by Geoff Ryman
‘Indeed,’ said Michael, smiling with him.
Picasso took his hand. ‘And the work. It will live too?’
‘For as long as you do. When you go … the paintings, the sculptures will disappear.’
‘Like the flowers,’ said Picasso, and his face was impossible to read. It was regretful but happy.
‘Except for your computer pieces. Uh … I have not told you this. Mr Miazga. I made a deal with him.’
For some reason, Picasso threw his head back and laughed aloud.
‘He is keying in all your work again. So it will remain. It will stay.’
Picasso was still laughing. ‘Poor Miazga. Regard! There is a man who gives everything!’
‘The deal is that you stop screwing his wife.’ It was terrible, but Michael was grinning too, without knowing why, and he suddenly spurted out a laugh.
‘He can have her!’ declared Picasso, with a wave of his hand, dismissing her, it, everything. He did his little dance in place. His eyes looked at Michael, brimming with affection.
‘You,’ Picasso said with one finger, ‘Are.’ Two fingers together made a sign like a blessing. He gave Michael a hug and whispered in his ear, ‘But I really hated screwing you.’ The words broke apart like rocks with laughter.
‘Liar,’ said Michael. ‘You were in me all night.’
Picasso stepped back. ‘True,’ he proclaimed. He spun around and held up a hand to wave goodbye. ‘True!’ he bellowed as he walked away without looking back.
And Michael for some reason felt a wild unaccountable joy. It was as if there were a giant tiger lily flower all red, spangled with yellow, and it was just beyond the sky, filling it, invisible. I am going to live, Michael repeated. He watched Picasso’s retreating back with love and gratitude and relief.
What am I looking for?
Michael finally cleared his in tray and saw in it a reminder: Deadline for grant proposals. He lightly thought: why have they sent me this? The answer seemed to thump him in the heart.
Because you didn’t do the application.
No, I must have. Didn’t I? Michael couldn’t remember not doing it, but then you don’t remember not doing something. He was sure he had done it. Well, or rather, it felt as if he had.
But his only memory of application forms was, he realized, from last year, for the six-month initial grant. He opened up My Documents, he did a Find, and there was no file called application or council form or any other likely name on either the server or his hard disk. He must have sent it out, he couldn’t have been so stupid. He sorted all his e-mails by address and looked at everything he had sent to the Council. Only one had an attachment, and that was simply the first progress report.
Michael went out and asked Ebru if she still kept a record of all outgoing and incoming white mail.
‘Mmmm hmmm,’ she said, and handed him the register.
‘Good girl,’ he said wistfully, looking at her brisk, pinched face. And she was a good girl, better than he was, to record each outgoing item of post. It wasn’t as if she were a secretary; she was a postgraduate researcher.
Michael went though the list line by line for all of August and September: there was nothing, no conventional mail whatsoever to the Biological Research Funding Council.
‘Do we have a record of courier dispatches?’
Her eyes said of course we have. ‘Yes; that what you were looking for, Michael?’
Ebru’s gaze was upsettingly direct and unfriendly. She was plainly fed up with him. There was nothing in her manner to encourage him to tell her what had happened.
Michael lied. ‘I sent back some faulty software, I need to know when.’
‘If you’ll tell me where you sent it, I could find it for you.’
‘Well, I know roughly when and I know it was sent by ordinary post, so it’ll be easier if I just scan for it.’
Her grey eyes rested on his, and then she shrugged, and then she passed the dispatch courier receipts in silence.
There were only three dispatches in August and none of them was for the Research Council.
Michael slowly closed the register and found that his limbs did not want to move.
There would have been no funding after September. They should have enough to finish the light learning experiment, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to use the current study as a benchmark to see how other learning activities produced different results. They’d talked about it, the team expected it. Michael could not believe he had done it, that he had fucked up that badly, that he was so stupid, so incompetent. His flesh seemed to crawl nervously all over his bones. Part of him was trying to take action, or perhaps, escape himself.
He rang the Research Council. The conversation left his heart shrivelled with shame. The neurology contact was a man called Geoffrey Malterton; he was, as ever, pleased to hear from Michael. Geoffrey sounded ebullient and efficient – nothing out of place in his life, then. ‘Whoa, you’re weeks too late, months too late. It’s all been snatched up, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, but you know how fierce the competition is for grants. What, is your project still unfinished?’
‘No, no, not at all, it’s just that we’ve had some new ideas.’ Michael tried to sound bright and alert.
‘Well, then you can always apply next year. The answer is no for this year’s money, I’m afraid.’
Michael asked Emilio for the project accounts. He avoided asking Ebru. As soon as he saw the spreadsheet, their situation was so obvious that he wondered why the staff weren’t talking about it. Simply there had been no income except interest since April 1. It was now late October.
Did they have enough to continue? Michael had supposed he would be able during the year to raise more money from other sources. They had roughly one month of money left. He recalculated their budget, remembering extras like stationery and an unpaid water bill, and had a moment’s panic. Then he remembered: interest was compounded quarterly and that would be paid in at the end of November. He had to track their steadily decreasing principal and try to calculate the interest. It was all back-of-an-envelope stuff, but the interest made the difference. They would be OK. OK meant that there was enough money to give all the staff their contractually required one month’s notice.
It could all be made to seem deliberate. They had enough basic data for this particular project. Michael could just ignore the idea they had of following it up. They should make sure that all the data were entered and correct and then run the reports. There would even be time and money if they needed one final trial, one more order of chicks, to fill any gaps in data or design.
There was always a problem with staff near the end of research projects. You tell them the project will end just when their work must be at its most meticulous. Yes, they had known all along it would come to an end, but yes, they have living expenses, so they have to look for the next contract or post. They often leave before finishing, especially when the end of the project is unexpected and they have not been able to plan.
He went to the cold store. They had done a good job while he was going crazy. The slides were all in order and labelled. The salami wafers had all been stained and stored. With something numb and slow, part way between dread and relief, he saw: the project had been well done.
Michael went into the soft, dark, red-lit room. There were the chicks, his chicks, peeping out of need and hunger. They were warm and feathery in his hands, as light as dust, kicking and struggling for life. They would be the last batch to be killed.
And suddenly Michael saw them afresh; they were like his Angels, all his beautiful Angels alive and hungry and here for such a short time. He was surprised by a sudden welling up of tears. He loved them. He was going to lose them. He loved them and he didn’t want to kill them. He stood transfixed by confusion, torn by irreconcilable emotions, for the chicks, for his research, for his old life with its mild addictions to science, order, and shots of whisky and of semen. He had no desire or idea of what to desire. Simply, he was unmanne
d, meaning he had lost a self. He could not answer the question, what do I do next? He stood in the dark, cradling a little chick, weeping for it, making peeping noises himself.
Please God, make it stop. Please God, just take it away! I’ll be good. Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.
The world is not to be seduced by words. The world stayed the same, waiting for him to act.
Michael remembered the first day they had moved into the arches. Ebru, Emilio, Hugh inspected their well-resourced lab, running around the cold room and the darkroom and the emergency generator like kids. Ebru had kept deferring to him: Michael, where do you want this? She had called him Hoja, which meant teacher or master in Turkish. She would never call him that again.
Michael took a deep breath. A parental voice from somewhere said, Do it, Mikey. Get it over with.
Shafiq was in his box. Ebru and Emilio were together in the front office. Hugh was hunched over the camera. Michael asked to see them in his office in fifteen minutes. He spent those fifteen minutes rehearsing what he was going to say, with his fingers spread out across the top of his desk as if they were roots drawing strength from it.
Their body language alone was enough to wrench his gut. Ebru slouched in, her arms crossed in front of her, her mouth pushed to one side with sour suspicion. Shafiq stood like Prince Charles, erect, his hands clasping each other behind his back as if to stop him hitting someone. His plump face was turned upwards as if absorbing a blow. Emilio looked bored, irritated, impatient. I spent so much time building them up into a kind of family, Michael thought. I’ve destroyed it.
‘There’s no good way to say this, so I’ll be brief. We’ve collected enough data which thanks to all your efforts is in super shape, really, it’s all recorded, the data entered, everything in cold store … well done … really.’
They were as frozen as the samples. They knew what was coming.
‘Which means that the project is entering the home stretch. We still have some slides to photograph, which I see Hugh has well in hand. What we need to do now is just make sure we have enough data, all in order, and then try to turn it into some kind of information. Which I reckon we can do before the end of the calendar year.’
Ebru flicked hair out of her eyes.
‘Um. That means the project will end and that I’ll be giving you formal notice today. You’ve been a terrific team, and I wanted you to have the news as soon as I did.’
‘You forgot to apply for the grant, didn’t you, Michael?’ Ebru said it.
‘No. I uh took advice from the Research Council. They said it was probably best if we tried to wind the project up as a second grant was highly unlikely.’ Michael wiped his mouth.
Was she going to call him a liar as well as incompetent? Ebru hovered for a moment like a hawk over a motorway bank. Then she shrugged and went silent. She couldn’t be bothered.
‘Any questions?’
There was a beat. Ebru shook her head and murmured, ‘No.’
‘Well, if you have any, just ask. Ebru, you and I will need to go over all the contracts and make the nuh-non-renewals official. Hugh, there is the photography to continue. Emilio, you and I will need to get going on the data processing.’
Silence.
‘I uh, was wondering if people wouldn’t like to get together today for a lunch. My treat?’
Never had words of his sounded so much like a creek running dry.
‘I would like to say thank you.’
The team glanced at each other. Ebru said it. ‘Maybe later, Michael. When the project ends, the last day or something.’
‘OK,’ said Michael. His hands did something awkward in mid-air. ‘OK, thanks, gang.’
They started to file out.
‘Oh. One other thing. Um. We really have a lot of data. And I was wondering if we really need, need any more. Which would mean … I want us to set this last batch of chicks free.’
That was enough to make Ebru stop and turn around. ‘Oh that is a good idea,’ she said, without any tonal variation in her voice.
‘Well, they’re such beautiful little things, and we’ve got a lot of data and it just seems such a shame…’
Oh God, oh no. He could feel his face. It was crumpling at the corners of his mouth, and his cheek was twitching up towards his eyes. He was starting to cry, and he had no real idea why.
It is a very strange sensation to break down in public and for that public to stare back at you stonily, completely unmoved by anything like sympathy. Cry, you bastard, their eyes seemed to say. Cry for your little project.
‘We could just let them go, in the park?’ He was begging.
Ebru said, ‘That is illegal.’
‘It’ll be an illegal little party.’ Michael bounced in his seat, trying to communicate that it would be naughty and fun.
‘It’s stupid, they’ll die, it isn’t even kind,’ said Ebru and turned and walked out. Shafiq shuffled away. Hugh said, ‘I’ll get going on the photographs.’ Emilio said, smiling but with a direct gaze, ‘Whatever you’re on, Michael. Stop taking it.’
They processed the chicks without even telling Michael they were doing it. They did it very quickly, and neatly. Michael went into the photography room. Hugh was photographing as before, but Ebru was staining samples.
‘Those are fresh,’ said Michael.
‘We have to do it while they’re young, Michael. Otherwise they will be too mature to compare with the other samples.’
‘I asked you not to do that.’
‘When?’ Ebru turned and her gaze challenged him, challenged his right to give any orders at all. ‘When did you ask me not to, Michael? We discussed your idea about setting them free and decided it was wrong. And we decided that it was stupid to waste them, and so we follow proper procedure.’ Her hand made an involuntary little wave, sweeping him away. ‘We will do everything in order, Michael. You don’t have to do a thing.’
‘I’m very unhappy you did that.’
Ebru held out her hands in something like helplessness. I am helpless to help you, Michael. I am helpless to say anything other than that your unhappiness makes no difference.
Michael had nothing else to do, so he typed all the official notices of non-renewal. He went over the accounts and planned the new expenditure. That is the kind of thing a good little boy does when admonished. There is no coming back from being justly admonished by your staff, and then being defied by them.
He worked alone in his office, deliberately until late. No one popped in to say good night, see you tomorrow. At 8.30 PM he did a round of the lab, turning out a few lights. In the reception box, the night guard was pleased to see him. He was a Londoner, ex-Cockney, a vanishing breed. ‘Hello, sir,’ he said, perking up. ‘I haven’t seen you this late in ages. How are you, sir?’ He sounded genuinely pleased to see Michael.
‘I decided to give up all that staying late.’
‘Oh, very wise, sir, very wise. My wife says the same about me at my age. But the money’s good, and between you and me, it gets me out from under her feet.’
It was terrible to be treated with friendliness and respect.
The leaves had begun to fall in Archbishop’s Park, and they had blown across the street, crunching underfoot. Walking back to Waterloo seemed to take forever; he shuffled with dreamlike slowness. He’d fucked it. He had well and truly fucked it. He stood stricken on the platform at Waterloo, wanting to hide.
He walked back to his old flat near Goodge Street on automatic pilot. He got all the way to looking up at his old window, and seeing his ceiling illuminated through it and a moving shadow, he thought oh good, Phil’s home.
Then he realized no, he’s not. No one is at home. Home is over, home is gone. My animal brain just walked me back here.
His animal heart stood outside the building yearning upwards at the light on the old ceiling. I want my job back, my beautiful project. I want my partner, my flat, my peace of mind. I want my old life back.
Too late, Michael
, you’re not going to get it.
The idea of walking back to Goodge Street tube, and going all the way to Camden, made him close his eyes with fatigue. He wondered if he could just ask the Miazgas to let him back in, for ten minutes’ snooze. He just wanted to clear his head. But he would have to explain to them, and worry them, and involve them again in his life.
So he turned, dazed as if on painkillers, and dragged his way back to Goodge Street station. Everything around him – the Eisenhower Security Center, the cenotaph in front of it – was like reassuring old friends seen after a divorce. There was the Reject Shop … no, it wasn’t. It was now something called Cargo. Change swept over everything like a tide; turn your back and it’s as over as the First World War.
Michael tried to find the flower. The flower was whatever he had touched when Luis had left him. The joy in the world, in himself. I have seen it. It was real. It can come when things go wrong.
It’s strongest when you have been brave and strong – not when you’ve fucked up, messed everyone over, lost it. Not when you’ve thrown your life out of the window.
There was now a porn shop on Tottenham Court Road.
Well there would be; they had been moving north out of Soho for some time, as real estate got too valuable even for the sex industry, and only cappuccino, it seemed, could turn a penny, or rather, enough pennies. GAZE the WORD the shop called itself. There were ribbons of coloured plastic across the door. There always were, in porn shops. Like ketchup bottles always looking the same.
‘Well hello, Professor,’ said a voice.
Someone was standing in the doorway. Michael blinked; it took him a moment to recognize who it was.
The guard from Goodge Street station. He was wearing a fancy T-shirt, the kind you’re not supposed to tuck in, and the same blue security trousers that made his legs and butt look somehow bolshy.
‘Have a look round, don’t be shy,’ the Guard said. He looked chunkier. Perhaps he had been working out, but his mouth still habitually sneered. He held apart the plastic strips as if opening a dressing gown.
‘Come on. I’m sure I’ve got something for you.’ He emphasized ‘you’, as if he knew and understood Michael.