Sweet Talking Money

by Harry Bingham

  ‘Photophobia?’ asked Cameron.

  ‘Fear of photos? Me?’

  ‘Not photos. Light sensitivity.’

  ‘Joke, OK? It was a joke. They have those in med school? Yes. Light sensitivity, pretty bad.’

  ‘Menstrual problems?’

  ‘If you’re from the press, I’ll kill you. I’ll get the boys here to jump up and down on your heads. I’ll get –’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Bryn. ‘I can assure you –’

  ‘I don’t need your assurances. Ben and Bobo are my assurances.’ The gorillas flexed their hands and made little white crescents with their teeth. ‘Sure I got problems.’ She went on to list her menstrual problems in enough detail that Bryn realised why she was concerned about the press. Here was a six-figure story if ever he’d heard one.

  Eventually Cameron was done asking questions and got out her needles. She took four tubes of blood, with her usual surprising expertise, and even persuaded her patient to go to the bathroom to fill a large screw-topped beaker with urine.

  ‘D’you dance?’ asked Kessler, returning, pale and sick, from the bathroom.

  ‘Dance?’

  ‘Yeah, for God’s sake, you must know what dancing is.’

  ‘No, I don’t dance.’

  ‘Huh, shame. You’ve got the body for it, and I’m short a female dancer at the moment.’

  ‘Well, I suggest you go hire yourself a dancer.’

  ‘Yeah, OK. Jesus,’ She was tired and Cameron was packing up. ‘Ben, Bobo …’

  The gorillas emerged from the gloom and cracked their fingers a few millimetres away from Bryn and Cameron. Bryn was keen to make his exit without assistance and hustled her to finish.

  ‘You coming to the show tonight?’ Kessler’s voice from the dark.

  ‘Uh-uh. Sold out,’ said Bryn.

  ‘Well, maybe next time. Thanks for the tree.’

  5

  With no gorillas to fill it, the elevator was spacious.

  ‘You think you’ll be able to cure her?’

  ‘Don’t know. Depends on what Kati and I turn up in the lab,’

  ‘Can you give a probability?’

  ‘No way. I could if she was a rat.’

  ‘You think you’ll be able to find out what’s wrong?’

  Bryn was nervous and his nerves made him batter away at Cameron, as though he was still a banker and she was his junior analyst. Her lips compressed with annoyance.

  ‘Oh, I already know what’s wrong,’ she said.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘She’s got a virus.’

  Bryn snorted. ‘What kind of virus? One you can do anything with?’

  ‘How would I know what kind?’

  ‘Will your lab tests tell you?’

  ‘No way. They’re not those kind of tests.’

  ‘Well, how are you going to kill it, if you don’t know what it is?’

  ‘I won’t be able to kill it. But still,’ Cameron shrugged, ‘it’ll give us a whole new data point and we can keep the blood stored for future analysis.’

  ‘Jesus, Cameron!’ Bryn was appalled. ‘What the hell do you mean, you can’t kill it? What the hell is the point of coming here if you can’t even kill the damn thing? We can’t spend eight thousand quid every time you feel like taking blood from someone.’

  Cameron’s face had whitened to something even more bloodless than its normal sun-free pallor. She said nothing and just stared ahead. Bryn relented. ‘I’m sorry. You said that with enough time and resources you could cure pretty much anyone. That’s what matters.’

  ‘I said that? Sorry. I can’t cure her.’

  They were in the lobby now, about to leave. There were a few people at the check-out desk, a dozen or so more at the bar. They all got to listen to what came next.

  ‘You can’t cure her?’ Bryn thundered, voice bouncing around the marble walls. ‘What the bloody hell do you mean you can’t?’

  ‘What I said. I can’t kill the virus. I can’t cure her. Clever things, viruses.’

  Bryn was beyond shock now. It was stupid, really, the whole bloody idea. Take some wacko doctor. Stick a brass plate on the wall. Cross your fingers and hope for a miracle. Jesus Christ! How could he have been so stupid? He whacked his head with his fist. ‘Jesus!’ He took a breath and tried to calm down, see if there was anything to salvage.

  ‘Maybe there’s something you can do. Check her nutrition, for instance. Maybe poor nutrition is making things worse.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘We could still come out with credit if we can alleviate things, even if we can’t cure her.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Give her some of your magic juice, like you did with me.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Improve her immune system, get it cranking as hard as it can.’

  ‘Sure. Like I say, doctors can’t do much against viruses. Nothing to beat the body’s own immune system.’

  Bryn stared at Cameron. Cameron stared at him. Around the lobby a couple of dozen people stared discreetly at the pair of them.

  ‘You’re going to do it, aren’t you? You won’t kill the virus, you’ll just get Kessler’s immune system to do it for you.’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘And you’ll be successful, won’t you?’

  For the first time, a smile twitched at Cameron’s mouth. ‘That’s the plan.’

  Bryn exhaled, with a mixture of anger, relief and a sudden sense of spreading safety. ‘Jesus, Cameron. Don’t ever let anyone tell you you’re easy to work with.’

  The smile that had twitched before now burst out into the open with a clear, pealing laugh. She pulled off the purple scrunchy at the back of her hair, tossing it into a waste basket and running her hands through her hair to restore it to its normal uncombed, unkempt appearance. She pushed him playfully with her hand on his chest.

  ‘God, you sure wind up easy,’ she said.

  Bryn opened his mouth to reply, but she was already walking away from him, laughing as she went. Bryn watched her from behind: this enigmatic, infuriating, dedicated genius of a woman. He paused for a moment, then started forward, hurrying to keep up.

  TEN

  1

  Back at the laboratory, it was an excited fivesome that rigged the microscope to the slide projector and slotted a slide containing Kessler’s precious blood beneath the lens. Bryn drew down the blinds to cover the river-facing windows. Meg and Mungo took seats quietly at the back, like kids allowed in to an adult entertainment on condition of good behaviour. Mungo munched noisily from a bag of pretzels, spilling handfuls through a tear in the packet. As the blinds came down, the image sharpened. Drawn in red and black on the wall, the secrets of the world’s biggest rock star came into view.

  ‘Wow. That’s Cheryl Kessler,’ whispered Meg.

  Cameron had centrifuged a blood sample to extract white blood cells only, and it was this that they looked at, the big ragged shapes swimming gently in their fluid, unaware that they were no longer running in some of the most famous veins in the entire world. Kati and Cameron watched for a while, the slow movement, the gentle change of shape. Bryn, Meg and Mungo waited in silence, waiting for a commentary to illuminate them.

  ‘Seems OK,’ said Cameron at last. ‘Let’s hit ’em with something, see how they cope.’

  A pipette of chicken protein dropped on to the glass slide, which slid back beneath the lens. The familiar blue invaders filled the picture and now the white blood cells – the macrophages and natural killer cells, the B cells and the neutrophils, and all the rest of the trillion-celled army – were called upon to act. As usual attention focused first on the macrophages, the all-gobbling vacuum cleaners of the blood. Slowly, like giant marine animals in some unfamiliar zoo, they began to attack their opponents. To Bryn’s uneducated eye, they looked like they were doing a good job.

  ‘How are they doing?’

  Kati and Cameron glanced at him, as though wondering if he was serious. M
ungo muttered something about how, ‘It’s not really fair servin’ chicken without BBQ sauce, or maybe one of them hot-hot-hot Jamaican things with all pepper and stuff. It’s no wonder, they’re all woooh about it.’ Mungo fluttered his hands to imitate a macrophage insulted by the lack of an adequate condiment selection. Meantime Cameron turned her gaze back to the wall, back to the slow motion battle-to-the-death. It was Kati, as usual, who volunteered to act as interpreter.

  ‘OK. There are a number of problems you can have. One is you may not have enough white blood cells. That’s not a problem here. If anything, and we’ll get some data on this shortly, I’d say Kessler was oversupplied. That means her body recognises a threat and is churning out white cells in response.’

  ‘So that’s good?’

  ‘Right, that’s good. But it’s one thing to have a lot of soldiers, it’s quite another whether they can fight.’

  ‘And?’

  As they had been speaking, one of the larger macrophages in the middle of the screen had turned full circle, struggling to engulf a blue-stranded piece of chicken protein. Kati turned her eyes back to the screen, her clear face sombre in the reflected light.

  ‘These macrophages are immature. They’re privates dressed as generals, kids in uniform. In the whole time we’ve been watching, we’ve seen a lot of huffing and puffing, but not a single kill. Not one.’

  Cameron had seen enough. She pulled the power cord from the projector and the image vanished as the room fell dark. The four others awaited her verdict. She flicked the lights on, and pulled her labcoat over the jeans and T-shirt which she had exchanged for her earlier temporary smartness.

  ‘You’ve picked us a tough one to start with.’

  Bryn smiled a keep-your-spirits-up kind of smile. ‘Shame she’s not a rat, then.’

  Cameron shook her head. ‘She’s got a serious illness, which is now a full-blown, late-stage, fully progressed disease. Even if she was a rat, we couldn’t be certain of getting a result.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘And do you have a prognosis, doctor?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Cameron. ‘I’d say we’re not going to go home tonight. Right, Kati?’

  2

  They didn’t go home that night or the night after or any night for the next two weeks. Meg and Bryn, Cameron and Kati brought bedding into the boathouse, slept when they were exhausted, and woke themselves six hours too early. Although Mungo offered his services, there was no real computing work to be done and he was a clumsy crisp-scattering liability in the laboratory, so after the first temper-fraught day, Bryn told him to leave the lab and get on with his work elsewhere.

  Meanwhile, for fourteen days the others worked non-stop. They had, as ever with Cameron’s work, two targets. Step one was to find the combination of nutrients which did most to boost Kessler’s immune cells. Step two was to find the peptide molecule which would act as the ELIMINATE VIRUS command in the body’s programming sequence.

  They began, logically enough, with step one, attempting to locate the precise combination of more than forty nutrients which would do most to support Kessler’s blood cells – a task which sounded simple enough, until Kati told them that ‘the number of possible combinations is far greater than the number of stars in the universe. You can’t get there using guesswork, you have to know what you’re doing.’

  In order to work most effectively, they divided themselves into teams. Cameron and Kati prepared the solutions, Bryn and Meg tried them out. Fairly soon, the two non-scientists were able to spot the obvious failures, and when they were in doubt, they called from their microscopes to one of the others, who came over to review the image. In every case what had looked to the laypeople like an encouraging sign, quickly disappeared on a more professional observation. As Bryn and Meg learned their trade, the number of times they called excitedly for help tailed off. When they did request a second opinion it was in a voice without hope.

  And so they slaved.

  3

  Four days into their marathon, at eight o’clock on Saturday night, Meg turned off the lamp of her microscope, rubbed her red-rimmed eye, and shoved the tray of glass microscope slides away from her with distaste. She got up.

  ‘Saturday night is party night,’ she announced.

  ‘You’re going out?’ said Bryn, incredulously.

  ‘I need you to help me reformulate my BCAA complex,’ said Cameron, in a tone halfway between surprise and warning.

  Meg ignored them. She disappeared upstairs to the consulting room which had been pressed into service as her bedroom, with its roll of foam and sleeping bag for her bed, a suitcase for her wardrobe, and a two-kilo bag of birdseed, with which she had vowed to befriend her precious parrot. She emerged fifty minutes later in a short black dress, clicking downstairs on heels two inches higher than could be comfortable, hair done, nails French-polished and gleaming, make-up perfect, leaving wafts of perfume on the air behind her.

  She walked back to the wet bench, where chemicals were made into exact solutions under Cameron’s eagle eye. She sat down in front of her calibrated beakers, her pipettes and her electronic balance, and began work once again.

  ‘Like I said,’ she explained, ‘Saturday night is party night.’

  4

  ‘How long have we got?’ asked Cameron.

  Bryn shrugged. ‘She was meant to be on tour in the Far East, but she cancelled all of that. In theory she has a few dates in Europe, then another Wembley gig, then back to the States, but the fact is no one knows. She’s sick enough she could go home at any time.’

  ‘That’s not the only problem. I only took four tubes of blood. We’re on the third tube already, and somehow I don’t see her giving us more, not unless we have anything to show for it.’

  She was right, of course, but it was hardly comforting. The next day, with step one still no closer to completion, they began on step two.

  5

  ‘Urine,’ said Cameron, holding out a collapsible plastic container which would expand to about a gallon when full.

  ‘Urine?’ said Bryn.

  ‘Yes, please. As much as you can manage.’

  Bryn expanded the container like a concertina. ‘I hate to tell you, but I don’t think –’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Cameron impatiently. ‘I’ve already given Kati and Meg jars to fill. I wasn’t too sure about Mungo. You think he does drugs?’

  ‘Think?’ said Bryn.

  ‘OK. Not Mungo, then. I’m about to go and do mine. You do yours. Between us we should get enough.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Enough for what?’ said Bryn.

  6

  It turned out that Cameron’s sudden obsession with urine collection was a smart shortcut for getting to step two.

  ‘It’s pretty simple,’ Kati explained. ‘There are basically two reasons why Kessler’s sick. One is her blood cells have gotten very weak. Two, she’s missing some of the command data her body needs to get it up and running.’

  ‘Command data? Peptides, in other words?’

  ‘Right. Now you can find peptides in blood, but it’s kind of easier to look for them in urine. Our plan is to compare some average healthy urine – that’s you, me, Cameron and Meg – against Kessler’s sample. If the healthy urine is packed with one particular peptide, and Kessler’s urine has none of it, then you can be pretty damn sure that the missing peptide is the one that you want.’

  ‘You mean the missing peptide is saying something like KILL THAT VIRUS.’

  ‘Exactly. I mean it’s a whole lot more complex, obviously. Like a whole lot more.’ She paused. There was this thing that scientists get, where they’re almost unable to let a simple explanation suffice when a more complex one is available. Kati wrestled with her conscience for a moment, before the angels won out. ‘But sure,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the idea.’

  7

  And as it turned out, step two – normally the tricky bit – was as easy as pi
e, just as step one – normally the simple part – continued to defeat their best efforts.

  They began their morning by exposing the two urine samples to a stream of heated air, evaporating the liquid and leaving them with a soft white residue, which Meg poked with a sterile glass rod, saying, ‘So that’s a piece of piss.’ Cameron and Kati then put the delicate powder through a string of processes to separate and identify its ingredients, mapping the results out in a complex black-and-white banding pattern on computer. Each band on the screen related to one particular peptide cluster, and the bigger the band, the more common the cluster.

  For the most part, Kessler’s urine looked pretty much the same as everybody else’s. Where the normal sample had a big band, Kessler’s sample also had a big band. Where the normal sample just showed a pale grey strip, hinting at the presence of a chemical in tiny quantities, then usually Kessler also had a pale grey strip, about the same in size and coloration.

  But there were differences, too.

  Most of them, Cameron dismissed. ‘She’s sick, remember, and sickness produces all kinds of changes in the body. Most of the peptide differences have nothing particular to do with this illness, they’re just telling us that she’s ill.’

  But as she and Kati bent over the computer, using the tab keys to inch along the complex structure, they suddenly, simultaneously, gave out a yelp of delight.

  ‘K3–34a!’ they shrieked.

  Meg and Bryn, who had been sent back to the tiresome and unrewarding labours of step one, looked at each other and smirked.

  ‘Not K3–34a,’ said Meg.

  ‘The old bugger,’ said Bryn. ‘Fancy good old K3–34a popping up here.’

  As the two scientists descended from cloud nine, Kati divulged an explanation. ‘We were half expecting it,’ she said. ‘Once, a long time back when we were only just starting, we had a patient a little like Kessler. Back then we didn’t have the Schoolroom or anything like that, we were just improving our peptide banding techniques. That patient had a hole at a spot called K3–34a, where everyone else had a perfectly normal dark band. We may be having problems with the first phase here, but we’ve as good as got the key to phase two in our hands.’