Sweet Talking Money

by Harry Bingham

  But for all the short interval of joy, the gloom was quick to descend again. The peptide code was useless, unless Kessler’s blood could be made strong enough to use it. The weary routine began again. Millilitre by millilitre, the precious tubes of blood drained away.

  8

  The following Saturday, it wasn’t just Meg who dolled herself up for an imaginary dance floor. Kati, too, getting into the spirit, disappeared off with Meg and came downstairs an hour later in the closest approximation of a party outfit that her bag, so hastily packed eleven days before, had been able to offer. Both women had shimmer eye-shadow, party hair, and ‘you can’t see ’em, matey, but our toes are stunning’.

  Bryn smiled at the new arrivals. ‘You look gorgeous,’ he said to them both, but with eyes only for Kati. ‘You look fantastic.’

  ‘You’re in luck, then,’ said Meg, ‘’cos looking is all you’re going to get. And how about you, Cammie? I’ve got a dress you can borrow, and I’m dying to get my hands on your hair.’

  But Meg’s entreaties were entirely disregarded. ‘Uh-uh. No way,’ said Cameron, checking the rubber band at the back of her head for tightness and rubbing her cheek on her labcoated shoulder, as though to remove any possibility of make-up from it. All the same, it was easy to see she wasn’t quite cool with the question. Her cheeks flushed pink in the lamplight, and it was with an angry fluster that she switched the conversation abruptly on to gel electrophoresis and cellular protein synthesis. Her sharpness of temper lasted all through the night, and was only truly gone when dawn broke the following day.

  9

  The following Wednesday. One millilitre of Kessler’s blood left in their fridge, all the rest of it gone in their fortnight’s fruitless quest.

  ‘We’ll try one more day, then give up,’ said Bryn.

  He was close to despair. No cure, no publicity. No publicity, no clients. No clients, no money. And without money, they could never turn Cameron’s potential into a usable product, and he’d have gambled everything he had, only to see every last bit of it lost.

  Cameron held the precious millilitre in her hands, tossing it in its glass container from side to side. Outside, it was evening. The sun was setting somewhere to the west, over the Thames, that big, strong, bridge-stapled river. The barge still bumped against the jetty outside, still covered in filth. Fifty yards downstream, the setting sun tangled in the branches of the willow tree, where a blue-green parrot enjoyed the last of the day, waiting for Meg to bring its now regular evening feed.

  ‘No, we’ve done enough for now,’ said Cameron. ‘Let’s go home, get some sleep, have a bath. When we reassemble tomorrow, we’ll see if any of us has had a brainwave. It’s not as if another couple of experiments is all we need.’

  She was right, and they agreed without discussion. Bryn called a cab – they all lived close enough in West London for it to be worth sharing – and they each went to their rooms to shovel dirty clothes into a bag for an overdue clean. Bryn hadn’t shaved for the last three days and he looked like a barbarian, a barbarian with a head-cold.

  When the taxi came, they drove away in silence.

  10

  The cab nodded out into the traffic. Twilight sank like a depression into the city.

  ‘God, it’s gloomy,’ said Kati. ‘Work all day in a darkened lab, then come home in the dark.’

  No one answered.

  ‘At least we tried. If anything in biochemistry could have cured her, we’d have found it.’

  ‘I blame Cheryl Kessler,’ said Meg. ‘Bloody woman for having an incurable disease. And for her horrible music.’

  ‘Cobblers,’ said Bryn. ‘You were humming it all last week.’

  ‘I hate it now.’

  For the last several days, Cameron had been silent and withdrawn. Although they tried not to let it be felt, everyone knew that this was Cameron’s hour, her moment of glory or failure, and as the shadow of failure lengthened across the days, the strain of it had told. She stared out of the taxi window, looking at the meaningless traffic, the din of lights, the empty residential streets and the still-busy commercial ones. Conversation fell silent.

  Then something in her sprang to attention. She quivered like a wolf-pack catching a scent.

  ‘My God, Kati, you’re totally right.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  They were moving fast in the outside lane of the Cromwell Road, in a London where traffic became more careless and more aggressive with every year. Cameron grabbed for the door handle and wrenched at it desperately. But the taxi doors locked automatically and the door stayed shut. Like a wolf caught in a cage, she bent round, with her back against her route of escape.

  ‘Chemistry. We tried everything. That’s exactly our mistake.’ She scrabbled at the handle once again. Red lights were forcing the taxi to slow but it hadn’t yet stopped. ‘For God’s sake, what’s with this goddamn cab?’

  The hunting-frenzy had seized her. Invisible scents were calling her, and nothing would stop her escape.

  ‘Cameron, wait. When the cab stops –’

  ‘If you want, we can –’

  She ignored them. She probably didn’t even hear them. Her nails scratched repeatedly at the fake leather of the door panel as she scrabbled at the handle. ‘Working in the dark, Kati. It’s not gloomy, it’s lunacy.’

  The cab squealed to a halt, the locks released, the door flew open, and Cameron was out on the road. Bryn tried to give chase, but, unlike his quarry, he wanted to avoid being flattened by a truck, and Cameron had raced through three lanes’ worth of fifty-mile-an-hour metal moving in a blaze of car headlamps and blaring horns. She almost collided with a cab, whirled round its bonnet to find its light on, leaped inside, and was soon carried off on the steel-and-rubber tide.

  Bryn got back into the waiting taxi. ‘Should we chase her?’

  ‘No,’ said Kati. ‘This is how all her best work is done. Late at night. On her own. In a frenzy.’

  ‘You know what she’s on about?’

  ‘Only what she told us.’

  And what she’d told them had amounted to just one word, screamed through an open window above the roar of traffic and the cursing of car horns.

  ‘Physics,’ she’d shouted, ‘don’t you see? Physics.’

  ELEVEN

  1

  This time the curtains were open and the eight-thousand-pound tree looked much the worse for wear. Its blossoms had fallen or gone brown and the leaves below were beginning to curl. The cherries remained as hard and glossy as ever.

  ‘Not much of a gift,’ said Kessler.

  ‘Have you kept it watered?’

  Kessler snorted. ‘Just because I’ve got to stick to water, doesn’t mean everything else has to. Ben and Bobo have been keeping it tanked up.’

  Bryn sniffed at the half-empty bottle which stood beside the tree. Gin. He emptied the remaining liquid over the roots.

  ‘Better get it soused. Nothing worse than a half-drunk cherry tree.’

  Kessler looked him up and down slowly, the way most men would look at most women most of the time if there weren’t such a thing as harassment laws. He was a bit brutish, Bryn. It’s hard to be over a certain weight and yet stay perfectly in proportion, and the bigger you’re built, the harder you have to work to keep in shape. Bryn was neither well proportioned nor in regular training, but then again Kessler was reputed to enjoy a little bit of rough with her smooth, a little bit of slap with her tickle.

  ‘I’ve trashed your tree,’ she said. ‘The doc here has fixed me up. Anything more we need do?’

  Kessler was in a dress so short, it was politer to call it a T-shirt, except that whatever you called it, it had shrunk so badly you might as well admit that it was fit for a tramp and leave it at that. Long black boots guided the eye up the leg, as if anyone’s eyes needed guiding. She had dark hair, pale skin and a crimson slash for a mouth.

  ‘We need to keep you well,’ said Bryn. ‘Cameron?’

  ‘Sure. The vi
rus is still in your system. It will be for the rest of your life. Your immune system has it under control and, if you keep your immune system happy, there’s nothing you need to worry about. I’ve got a list here of dietary recommendations, plus a list of supplements, plus I want you to have a six-monthly check-up for a couple of years at least.’

  Kessler’s foot tapped on the carpeted floor, practising a dance routine. Every time she practised, though, her foot ended up an inch further away from the other one. Bryn watched with the intensity of a professional choreographer, though a choreographer would probably have been looking at the feet and not let his eyes be guided anywhere by a pair of black leather boots.

  ‘No alcohol,’ said Cameron, ticking the points off on her list.

  ‘Cocaine?’ asked Kessler.

  ‘Cocaine?’ Cameron was brusque, but truthful as always. ‘It could be preferable in some respects, but it’s hard to say. There hasn’t been the same amount of work done on cocaine.’

  ‘Everyone I know goes to work on cocaine.’

  ‘I’d recommend you drink a pint of fruit juice and a pint of vegetable juice daily.’

  ‘When you say vegetable, do you mean actual coma victims or can I make do with paralytics?’

  Cameron dropped her pen. ‘You want to stay well? Or you want to screw around? Your call, I honestly don’t give a damn.’

  ‘OK, sorry. Fruit juice. Veg juice. Not too much cocaine.’

  ‘I’d advise you to take better care with your diet than you have done in the past.’

  ‘I’m a man-eater,’ whispered Kessler, not looking at Cameron and with her feet now too far apart to be of any use on the dance floor.

  ‘Any recurrence of symptoms, call me immediately.’

  ‘Itches, for example.’ Kessler scratched herself in a place where she might have been feeling itchy. It was a gesture which would have attracted anyone’s eyes, especially given the dress she was wearing, but as Bryn’s eyes were already firmly on the spot, his weren’t in need of further attracting.

  Cameron scowled, and anger burned in the tips of her ears, but first and foremost she was a doctor, and her duty was to help the sick. ‘I don’t give a damn if you get scabies, leprosy, psoriasis and eczema all rolled into one. But any fever, giddiness, photophobia, exhaustion, give me a call right away.’

  ‘OK, doc.’

  ‘That’s it. Normally, we’d charge for our services, but I guess that since we’ve already given you an eight-thousand-pound tree, giving you a check at this point would be a little meaningless.’ There was bitterness in her voice.

  ‘Thanks, Cameron. I’ll settle up with Miss Kessler.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  Cameron showed no sign of moving.

  ‘Thanks, Cameron. I’ll see you later.’

  Cameron waited another moment, but Bryn was firm and she had no option but to leave. She left, pale and furious. She said not another word to Bryn, but as she packed her briefcase, her hands were visibly shaking.

  ‘Miss Kessler, my fanny,’ said the rock star, tugging Bryn into the bedroom. He was a big man, but he tugged easy.

  Ben and Bobo, the gorillas, had been banished into the bedroom during the medical stuff, but now they were banished back again. Bryn smiled at them as they left.

  ‘Thanks for getting me well,’ said Kessler.

  ‘Pleasure,’ said Bryn.

  ‘Are you and your doctor friend an item?’

  ‘Christ, no. Just partners. Business partners.’ Kessler had read something else into Cameron’s anger, but whatever it meant, it wasn’t her problem. ‘How much publicity do you want?’ She hooked a thumb into the top of her dress and pulled. The Lycra fabric sprang off and rolled itself into a ball. ‘Big, huge, or gigantic?’

  Bryn sat on the bed and removed his trousers.

  ‘Gigantic,’ he said.

  2

  Physics had proved to be their unlikely, not-conceived-of salvation.

  After the event, Cameron had been able to explain it calmly; explain in sequence what had not come to her in sequence, what had come to her in a single blinding flash, like a hilltop rider seeing lightning illuminate the entire floodplain beneath.

  ‘As Kati said, we’d taken the chemistry as far as it could be taken. I don’t mean we’d explored every possible combination, but what was weird was that nothing we tried even made a shadow of difference. It’s like our patient had pneumonia, and all we had was sugar pills. There had to be some totally different approach, something which would allow all our brilliant biochemical techniques to take effect. What could it be? It was obvious really.’ Here was our patient lying in darkness, hadn’t seen daylight for God knows how many weeks, her blood, was crying out for something which isn’t even a part of chemistry … Light is a nutrient, after all. You can get light-deficiency diseases, just like you get vitamin-deficiency diseases. In Germany, they shrink tumours by exposing blood to polarised light.’

  ‘So all Kessler really needed to do was open her curtains?’

  ‘No, of course not. She had a serious viral illness, which needed the Schoolroom plus all our chemical techniques. It’s just that for all our good stuff to take effect, we needed to supply one extra critical ingredient. That’s all.’

  And so it had been. They’d bathed their last millilitre of blood in an ocean of full spectrum polarised light, using a protocol which Cameron had obtained from a senior German researcher. Then, going right back to the very first series of chemical baths they’d used, they tried out Kessler’s blood for signs of life. They got what they were looking for straightaway. They exposed the rejuvenated blood to the K3–34a peptide, and on its very first run, the Schoolroom achieved an excellent first-time score of 24%. With further experiments they hoped to push the figure up beyond 60%, but that had been for the future. All that had happened in the present was that Cameron powered down the Schoolroom, patting it on its white-domed head, congratulating it.

  ‘We’ve cracked it,’ she said. ‘We’re there.’

  3

  From that moment on, Bryn and Cameron, who had been working so closely together, began to move in different worlds. There was still a lot of work to be done on the science side, and adapting the treatment to Kessler’s veins was going to mean a whole ocean of challenge which Bryn didn’t understand. But meantime, Bryn was busy with his own projects.

  There was the barge for one thing. His house sale was due to complete at any moment, and when it did Bryn would be homeless. On fine days, and not-so-fine days, and on evenings which stretched far into the night, Bryn scrubbed at the barge with his wire brush until he’d exposed the strong clean wood beneath the mould. He painted the woodwork white, picking the barge boards and stovepipe chimney out in black. He cleared out the dank interior and burned the ancient and mildewing furniture in a pile on the riverbank. He prised open the windows and oiled their hinges. He sold most of the rest of Cecily’s furniture and paintings (despite increasingly spiky little notes from her about returning it all) and bought himself some new furniture: a couple of vast old chesterfields rescued from a Portobello junk shop, an iron-bound oak chest bought at auction in Brecon, and a huge double bed which dominated the great stern cabin with its views south, east and west over the river. There was still masses to be done before the barge was finished, but at least it was habitable. Meg brought in armfuls of daffodils and set them down in vases, jugs and milk bottles all over the barge. It was airy and spacious, fresh and inviting; a one-person apartment to house Bryn’s new one-person life.

  But more important, there was the Fulham Clinic, still little more than a brass plate on a wall and a crazy idea for a global medical research company. But Bryn was long past rejecting things just because they were crazy. He called phone engineers to expand the switchboard to take twenty outside lines. He began to draw up plans for extending the clinic by building a series of consulting rooms in a kind of lean-to arrangement at the side. Meantime, Bryn retained a specialist medical recruitment agency to beg
in the search for a half-dozen senior doctors, a similar number of nurses, and two or three receptionists.

  ‘The Fulham Clinic?’ said the girl from the agency. ‘I’m not sure I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Bryn. ‘You will.’

  4

  The final night of her European tour, Kessler was booked for a last sell-out performance at the Wembley Arena. On stage, shoved away at the back, was her band. In front, dominating the stage, was a massive bed, front legs lower than the back, tilting it like a display case. It was covered in sheets of red satin, piled with furs, heaped with pillows of scarlet and purple.

  A thrill surged through the fans, a thrill they couldn’t quite explain. Rumours passed from person to person: tonight was a biggie, tonight was special, tonight would make history. Nobody was aware of starting the rumours – nobody except the people paid by Kessler to start them – but they gained in size and velocity as they shot from mouth to mouth. Tonight was huge; tonight was extraordinary; tonight the world would catch its breath.

  The lights fell. The stage sank into blackness, the huge bed briefly invisible. A quick movement in the darkness, sensed not seen. The lights rose, the band struck up, an instrumental number, but popular. The first howls rose from the audience. Then, tempo rising, the music gathered itself into a thunderclap, the topmost sheet was pulled from the bed, and there was Kessler, dressed only in a black satin chemise. The howls rose into shrieks as the gig got into its stride.