He turned and leaned back on the kitchen counter. Posing, she thought. He still looked tanned and healthy, heroin-thin with no trace of a beer belly. His face was more deeply etched than before. He had been working hard, or partying hard, or both. He was looking at her and grinning. His pupils were normal-sized, he blinked normally: no clinical signs of drug use.
“I suppose you’re wondering,” he said archly, “just why I invited you to my secret lair.”
“‘Epigenetics’ was what you said.”
His phone call had come right out of the blue. She hadn’t even thought about him for years, since their parting after that afternoon watching the last Concordes land. They had been postgraduates then, studying for their Ph.D.s, starting out as flatmates and, with a lazy inevitability, becoming lovers.
After the briefest exchange of personal histories on the phone he had asked her for a big, big favour, as she was the only person in the world he could possibly ask. She was a respected scientist, inside what he called ‘the establishment’. He had Googled her recent work on the genetic basis of leukaemia and was knocked out by it. He needed her to come and take a look at his work and tell him how it could be commercialised, written up, taken forward.
“I stayed outside the establishment,” he said. “You know how it was always my mission to pick up on the bits that mainstream science missed? It’s paid off, big time, but I don’t know what to do with it next.”
“Is this really science, or fairy stories?” she asked. She knew about Jack’s enthusiasms from the old days.
“Science. Unbelievable, but science.”
He had stubbornly refused to tell her any more than that.
“If I told you, you would not believe me,” he said. “And you wouldn’t come. Which would be tragic! If I don’t tell you, you’ll have to come to see it for yourself—and then, you will believe. You will believe!”
It was typical Jack. Eventually she agreed, not because she was interested in his work in the slightest, but because he wanted her. She had warned him about going outside the pale of real science, and seven years later there he was. Needing to be rescued, again.
Grant was set against her going.
“He’s a complete shit,” said Grant. “He’s a liar and a thief. And just incidentally a drug dealer. He obviously wants something from you. Probably money, from the sound of it…but who knows what? You’re not going out to some remote place in the middle of nowhere with him on your own.”
“He’s harmless. And there is no way I’m going to have the two of you in the same room. It wouldn’t be constructive.”
She was not scared of Jack. His cowardice, his avoidance of conflict, had been one of the recurrent themes in their relationship. The only violence had been directed towards him, on those occasions when Lottie had found about some underhand act and had completely flipped.
In the worst of these he had casually mentioned at the end of an evening that her mother had phoned that afternoon: Lottie’s brother had been injured in a car accident. Not badly injured, Jack said, and he had not wanted to spoil their evening. Lottie totally lost it and started flinging china mugs at him which exploded against the wall or bounced off his arms.
He became the pathetic victim and she was instantly overcome by remorse. She never dreamed he would be capable of actual cruelty or physical violence. He was amoral enough, she had no illusions about that, but he lacked the necessary guts.
Jack was always looking for short cuts. He thought only idiots made life difficult for themselves and rules were for losers. As a student, he always copied lecture notes rather than going to lectures himself. As a postgraduate he borrowed other people’s work where he could get away with it, or fudged results so he did not need to go through the laborious process of repeating experiments. He called it a flexible attitude.
Jack’s popularity nosedived after he interfered with a fellow student’s project, changing the doses of drugs being used on a set of lab rabbits. The result had been twenty dead rabbits and six months’ work wasted. Jack felt it was worth it because he might just have been on to something big.
“Win some, lose some,” said Jack. He never admitted responsibility, but everyone knew.
His flexibility extended to his personal life too. He took money from her purse because it was the easiest way of getting cash. He did a bit of small-scale drug dealing because he used the stuff himself, and it was the easiest way of getting money. He borrowed Lottie’s car without asking because, hey, what was he supposed to do and why was she making such a thing out of it? Why did the insurance matter when nothing had happened? He broke her laptop, but that wasn’t really his fault, was it?
She learned soon enough not to trust him. Then everything was fine.
He had been predictably useless, and entertaining, as a flatmate. He was always there to crack open a bottle of wine, light a joint, and bitch about mutual enemies. But she knew not to expect him to say when they ran out of coffee, or printer ink, or toilet paper, let alone buy any of these things himself. Sending him for groceries was a recipe for disaster; she found him an hour later, browsing the science fiction section of the Crow bookshop next to the supermarket.
As a boyfriend he often surprised her with romantic gestures—a CD she had mentioned, unexpected romantic evenings out—but failed on basics like letting her know when he was going to be away for the evening, the night, or the weekend. He played in a band sometimes. He enjoyed performing but rarely showed up for rehearsals. He liked the idea of being a rock star, but not the craft and the graft of a working musician.
Jack hungered for big results. He did have a knack for finding potentially significant research in the literature that others had missed and making something of it. When he was fired up, he worked hard for short periods, but the long slog of laboratory work was beyond him. He favoured what he called the penicillin style of discovery: one chance finding of a mould in a Petri dish, and you’ve discovered antibiotics and revolutionised medicine. You just had to look in enough Petri dishes rather than getting hung up with doing tiny variations on the same experiment all the time.
“Penicillin wasn’t the work of one man,” Lottie told him.
“Yes it was,” said Jack. “Everyone knows about Alexander Fleming.”
“The first patient treated with penicillin got better for two days, then died when they ran out,” said Lottie. “It took hundreds of people working on different strains of mould, finding new ones and growing them before they found one which could produce enough penicillin for it to be useful.”
“Yeah, the backroom people,” said Jack, shrugging them away. “If that’s all you ever want to be, go and be one. A miracle that cures someone for two days is a miracle—the rest is details. It’s Flemings that change the world, not drones.”
Jack’s Ph.D. thesis looked promising, but his progress was uneven and Lottie wondered how much of it would fade away under close scrutiny. Most people wait until after they complete a doctorate before they change the world, but Jack was in a hurry.
There had been no particular triggering factor for their breakup. But one summer afternoon they had been sitting together in Norwood Park, watching the last three Concordes make their final approaches over London, and it had seemed like a time for endings.
“I think I’ll move out,” she said when the last plane had disappeared behind the buildings, gliding down to Heathrow. “It’s just not working for us, is it?”
“If that’s how you feel,” he said. He managed to sound faintly injured but without any interest in winning her back. As always, he wanted to put the responsibility on her. He did not seem especially upset by the idea and made no attempt to talk her out of it.
She realised afterwards that going with Jack had been the lazy option for her. He was undemanding, but when she was with him her work had also trailed off. She had spent too many afternoons anaesthetised by cheerfully mindless television when she should have been working, too many mornings agreeing that they didn�
�t really need to get up yet.
It was something of a surprise that he had carried on in science. Her Internet searches showed that he had not published anything since his incomplete and contested Ph.D. The only things with his name on were a slew of articles in alternative health magazines and web sites. There did not seem to be any particular pattern to them. Jack had been trying out one field after another—looking, no doubt, for that elusive Petri dish.
Meanwhile Lottie had been doing it the hard way. She had worked on the genetics of leukaemia, in protein changes associated with Alzheimer’s, and the basis of some inherited bone diseases. It was not earth-shattering stuff, but she had been diligent and thorough. Now she had her own laboratory and her own little team with two anxious Ph.D. students of her own.
She also had Grant, her husband, who gave her the same unwavering devotion he gave his beloved Crystal Palace F.C. Grant cooked exquisite but insanely hot curries, worked off his hangover digging in the allotment on Sunday mornings, and brought back flowers or vegetables. He worked as hard as a hospital administrator as she did as a biochemist; he had some bad days at the office but cheered up as soon as he saw her in the evening. Jack had been a good talker, but Grant was a good listener.
The chances against Jack’s biochemical researchers having actually found something were astronomical. But something in her wanted to see him again. Did she want to gloat?
Perhaps there was some of that; he at least would appreciate how much hard work she had put in and would be able to see how it had paid off at last. It would be good to meet up and talk about the old days living in that grotty flat. Long Saturday evenings at the Hollybush and long Sunday mornings sharing a Full English at Domali. But mainly she had gone simply because he asked.
Jack poured boiling water into the kettle, and the aroma of green tea slowly suffused the room. He really did look happy, deep-down happy, in a way she had never seen.
“It’s a good variety,” he promised, pouring the tea into two conical cups stamped with Japanese ideograms. “You’ll like this.”
He brought the laptop over, placed it on the table, and cleared a stack of books off a kitchen chair to sit down beside her. He started up a PowerPoint presentation.
“This is just a rough version,” he said. “But it’s got all the main ideas.”
“I thought this was about results you want to share? Not a sales pitch.”
“Oh yes. Yes yes yes yes,” he said. “Big results. Big time. Bigger than big. You won’t believe. But it needs context.”
He was getting excited. He spilled the tea as he poured, and pushed a cup over to her. He clicked the mouse pad, then stood up, adopting a stance copied from a TV presenter.
A title came up: Human Epigenetics and the Norwood Builder.
“I’ll explain the Norwood Builder part at the end,” he said. “It’s from Conan Doyle. People laughed at him when he got into spiritualism and weird science, but he knew something. I think it came to him through theosophy and Blavatsky…anyway, my little journey started with the mighty Paracelsus.”
A woodcut image appeared on the screen, of a balding man in what might have been a mediaeval monk’s habit. His hands were resting on the guard of a sword with the word AZOTH visible on the pommel.
“Oh God,” said Lottie. “Not him again.”
“Him again,” affirmed Jack, grinning. “The greatest alchemist of the sixteenth century, possibly the greatest scientist that ever lived. Paracelsus, despised in his own time and proven to be right about everything centuries later.”
“Inventor of homeopathy,” she mocked.
“Inventor of the first painkiller, and chemotherapy, first man to realise that diseases are caused by germs, that mental illness isn’t evil spirits. The original Faust, the original Frankenstein—possibly the first person to clone a human—”
“Yeah, right.” She blew on her tea and sipped it. “The fat German bloke who boasted a lot. I remember you going on about him. A lot.”
“He disagreed with the medical-scientific establishment of the time about everything.” Jack picked up his cup of tea, put it to his lips, and put it down without drinking as the words kept coming. “He disagreed with the surgeons, with the pharmacists, with the learned doctors. He believed that the people who really knew were the herbalists, the midwives. The ones who had actually been treating patients successfully for hundreds of years!”
“We’ve had this conversation,” said Lottie. “And herbal medicine is still crap. Okay, mainly crap.”
“Anyway, he spent his time going out and talking to village wise women, and hedge-wizards, and all sorts of disreputable characters. He travelled the entire known world—Europe, Asia, Africa, everywhere. And he left behind lots of books, but they’re all written in cryptic alchemists’ language that nobody can really decipher.”
“What’s a hedge-wizard?” Lottie asked.
“Whatever. Is that tea okay for you?”
“It’s fine.”
“Unlike the medical establishment, he didn’t reject anything that contradicted Aristotle. And that’s how he figured things out, like realising that miners’ diseases were caused by their working conditions—first documented occupational disease. But if someone told him about a werewolf, he didn’t laugh at them. He made notes.”
“Were-fucking-wolves?” Lottie exploded. “What are you on?”
“You see?” said Jack excitedly. He was practically hopping up and down. “You’re laughing, because you don’t understand. I will show you werewolves, and much more, much, much more….”
“I’m sorry, Jack,” she said. “But you’ve got to cut the weird stuff out if you want people to take it seriously. Paracelsus, medieval chemotherapist, fine. Roll the next slide.”
“That’s strange,” he said, looking under her chair. “Is that a mouse? Don’t move.”
He leaned over and she felt his hand lightly on her arm. Before she realised what was happening he jumped backwards, and she saw that she was hand-cuffed to the chair. Her hand went to the phone in her pocket.
“Please!” he said. “Lottie, please! Don’t be angry, I had to stop you going away. You’ve got to listen to all this.”
She tugged at the handcuffs. “Get these off,” said Lottie.
“I promise I’ll take them off afterwards.”
“Get. These. Fucking. Off. Now!”
Jack took another step back, waving his hands. “Calm down please, Lottie. This is really, really important. Literally life or death.”
The phone was still in her pocket. She could call the police, or get Grant to call them. Even if Jack wrestled the phone out of her hands Grant would know she was in trouble, and he had the address. Out here it might take the police fifteen minutes, but just knowing they were coming would stop Jack in his tracks.
Then what? He would probably release her at once, apologising and begging her not to press charges. She would have to stay until the police arrived, and then go through a whole embarrassing process of making a statement. The police would probably put it down as some sort of domestic incident. Would they be grinning and smirking behind her back, assuming it was a sex game gone wrong? Or would they take it seriously and want to charge Jack with kidnapping, arresting him and starting a long process through the courts? Did he already have a criminal record?
Her whole visit would be a humiliating failure. Grant would have been proved right. However much he downplayed it, he would never quite be able to trust her out of his sight again. Jack would be in trouble, which was his own fault, but she would be at the centre of it. How long would she have to spend in court? What would get dragged up in court? Would that sort of thing make the local newspapers at least?
On the other hand, if she just sat through his stupid presentation, then he could let her go and she never needed to mention it to Grant, admit he was right all along.
“Please,” whined Jack. “I’m begging you. I need you to see this so badly. It’s so, so important.”
&n
bsp; She hesitated. If Jack did anything threatening, made any kind of move towards her, she would use the phone. But for now she would stay chilled, listen to what he had to say if it was so important to him.
“This had better be good,” she said. “Fucking good.”
“Paracelsus noted how monsters could be born of normal parents, and realised that it was not what we would call genetic,” Jack said, speaking quickly. “They were not inherited from the parents. He said deformities could be caused simply by the imagination of the mother—”
“Ah yes, enlightened Renaissance misogyny,” snapped Lottie. “Let’s blame the woman.”
“Not blame,” said Jack. “The placebo effect works because when you believe that a sugar pill will make you better, it can have a physical effect. The nocebo effect is the same in reverse: if you believe something is harmful it can kill you. People can die simply because they think a witch doctor has cursed them.”
“Documented cases?”
He waved the objection away. “Nobody knows how the placebo effect works. I have an idea. And it could affect an unborn child.”
“Spit it out then,” said Lottie.
“Paracelsus described human-animal hybrids, and how they could be formed by imagination alone,” said Jack. “Which is where we get to—big drum roll here!—epigenetics. Cells are building blocks. Just like Lego: you could make a duck out of pig cells, or a fish out of human cells.”
A tractor passed close by the cottage, its big wheels throwing gobbets of mud up behind it. Even out here in the country you were never really that far away from other people.
“The DNA is the same in all your cells, but eye cells are different from tooth cells,” Jack was saying. “Epigenetics controls which genes are turned on and off, keeps all the functional cells in the right place. It also shapes the whole organism.”
A second slide appeared: a slender, glamorous actress in black with a diamond necklace and tiara, holding a long cigarette holder to her lips.
The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 30