Acid Song (2 page)

‘The only time I met Steve Watson,’ Richard corrected, even though it was a lie.

‘Just tell the story.’

‘Okay. Well, where to start? It was nineteen seventy-six. Winter, as I remember it, but you can check the records and discard that cherry if it’s rotten. I’d been back in the country three months. I’d just finished a post-doc in Berlin and people were surprised I’d returned. I’d shown promise, academically, and mine was the sort of career people were taking bets on.’

Richard liked this business of recollecting, the way it gave shape to things. And of course, it made him feel important. A reasonable sort of an indulgence, perhaps even a necessary one.

‘I was, as you know, as much a mathematician as a biologist back then. I had done most of my work in population genetics. But
molecular
biology was the field that was really beginning to open up. We were getting the first glimpses of the methods by which simple chemicals went about this business of making life. It’s hard to explain how exciting that was, at the time. We all felt the next breakthrough just around the corner, and I suppose I dreamed of being part of it.

‘Ludicrous perhaps, to be plotting a revolution from Palmerston
North, and I think at the back of my mind there was always a fear of that, of it all descending into farce. But as I say, I was young, and fears were easily ignored. We didn’t have any funding, or any
established
reputations, or even any agenda. But there was an optimism, a feeling I suppose that a world of new understanding was awaiting whoever could find the right crack to peer through.

‘I’d just started my lecturing, which is a great antidote to youthful optimism. Nothing more clearly defines the expanse of your own ignorance than trying to teach. I soon discovered that even the least sophisticated thinkers amongst them were still capable of asking the most devilishly difficult questions.

‘So if any of this is anybody’s fault, and I certainly do like having somebody to blame in these things, it is the fault of a man by the name of Alfred McCreedy, a lecturer in chemistry whom I
befriended
one self-pitying night in the staff lounge. He was drinking his way through a marriage break-up, as I remember it, and apologies to the poor dead fellow if that’s my memory adding interest. He was most certainly drunk, whatever the excuse, and when it was my turn to bemoan the sorry state of university living, I mentioned my lecture difficulties. And he told me not to worry, that every lecturer went through exactly the same thing. And then he shared with me his solution. “The trick,” he told me, “is to get on top of the problem early.”

‘The problem of course being the damnable curiosity of the students, and to our eternal discredit neither he nor I had any trouble viewing it that way. McCreedy’s solution was ingenious. Thank them for their question, commend them for their insight, and then recommend a reading that might help them with their question. Not a specific book you understand, but something
obtuse
and generic.
Conjectures and Refutations
by Karl Popper was his favourite. “They never read it,” he assured me, “and they never ask another question.”

‘A hell of a word, never. She had a round face. Her hair was cut in a sort of pageboy style as I remember it, and she stood out on account of her being a woman. They weren’t unknown in the biology classes, but they were solidly in the minority. She sat near the front, she wore glasses and my notes were poor. She asked a question, of course, I don’t remember what, and I gave the prescribed answer. And that, McCreedy had assured me, would be that.

‘I knew something was up when she stayed behind to double check she had the title right. The next day I spied her sitting in the library, halfway through the recommended reading and showing no signs of slowing down. So you know, never take advice from a drunkard. I stayed up most of the night reading the book myself, and the next day Steve Watson visited the campus. History in the end is little more than the careful recording of accidents.’

Richard stopped. It was the sort of anecdote he enjoyed retelling: capricious, and amusing at his own expense. The older he became, the more his past separated out into these little islands of story. Stories which would come across well enough on film, he imagined. This was his gift, and academically speaking, his weakness too. He had a way of dropping his words in such a pattern that believers could always find what they were looking for.

‘So don’t stop there,’ Amanda told him.

‘You know the rest.’

‘Yes, but the viewers don’t.’

‘So you’re still clinging to this viewer fantasy are you?’

‘Tell it exactly like you did at Eva’s that time.’

‘You should have filmed that.’

‘You wouldn’t have let me.’

‘I wouldn’t.’

Eva’s was the suburban restaurant where Amanda had first pitched her ambitious plan. At Eva’s he had been drunk. Drunk and flattered, with a full stomach and the celebrations still six months in the
future. Had he known then what he knew now, he never would have agreed to any of this. Richard looked for a place to begin, pulled cautiously at a strand and felt his whole head tighten.

‘Just whenever you’re ready.’

‘I’m looking for a place to start.’

‘Just anywhere is fine. That’s why we have editing.’

‘Couldn’t you just generate the whole interview digitally? Isn’t that how these things are done nowadays?’

‘Would you prefer to be a dinosaur or a gorilla?’

‘Make me a mermaid.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘I was thinking of shipwrecks.’

‘I thought you had to be somewhere at eleven?’

‘I do. Meeting of the penguin research group.’

‘Is it interesting?’

‘Of course it’s interesting.’

‘Let’s get back to Watson.’

‘You could use that as the title.’

‘For what?’

‘This documentary.’

‘It’s already got a title.’

‘What?’

‘
Clash of the Mermaids
.’

Richard smiled. She was bright, Amanda, which was her weakness. Arguments fell into place too easily for her; she had little trouble believing they were solid. It gave her no appreciation of the fault lines that ran through everything.

‘Stephen Watson was young, and brilliant, and fêted, and
controversial
, and English. He was only three years my senior, but whereas I was an antipodean optimist, plotting world domination with my friends on the back of a beer mat, he was already dominating it. His book,
Gene Genie
, had sold something hideous like a million copies
around the world, and that made him a superstar. He was out here on what was essentially a promotional tour. Academic purists sneered, of course; he wasn’t a real researcher, he was simply
packaging
knowledge, making it accessible to the world beyond the university walls. As if making knowledge accessible wasn’t important work, God help us. I’d read his book with some admiration, and more than a little envy. He was a gifted communicator. He captured that sense of wonder most scientists feel, but few are able to distil.

‘But it wasn’t just his popularity that attracted scorn, it was what others perceived to be his politics. Most biologists at the time were content to make their mountains out of molehills; we had by and large observed the old Cartesian demarcation and left humanity to the historians and the poets. Applying evolutionary speculation to humanity was considered not just a little gauche, but also rather dangerous. But not everybody is cowed by convention, and the
sociobiology
juggernaut was getting up another head of steam. And as Watson had discovered, while wondering out loud about the evolved nature of the human mind might have been frowned upon in academic circles, out in the general public the appetite for such thinking was huge. He told of industrious worker bees, battling seals, faithful voles, and sneaky cheating little birds; and he asked what was then something of a taboo question. Aren’t we a bit like that too? And people bought the book and answered, “Not me, but a lot of people I know”.

‘Like any great popularist, Watson went for the controversial and the titillating. He was pushing our buttons quite deliberately, and people either saw him as a breath of fresh air, a welcome antidote to the po-faced dictates of the social sciences; or as a misogynistic, baby-strangling racist. He was young, giddy with power and very good at what he did. And what’s more, he was bringing it here, to our windy little town in the middle of nowhere, a land of friendly flightless birds, hopelessly ill-equipped for the arrival of such a predator.

‘Although I must say it didn’t stop us giving our very best. There was a protest outside the lecture theatre, led by a history lecturer who I had flatted with back in our undergraduate days. Susan Russell. She was an attractive woman, which allowed her to scorn those of her sisters who turned to the diets and make-up she never needed. At the protest she had a banner which read “Hitler was a sociobiologist” and a T-shirt she had made herself, with “I am not defined by my biology” scrawled in such a way that you had to pause and regard her breasts to read it. Which I foolishly did. Only when I looked up did I realise who it was I was inadvertently ogling. “What the fuck are you doing going in there?” Susan demanded of me, not unreasonably, and I just had the presence of mind to realise it was my queuing for the lecture, rather than my consideration of her breasts, which she was questioning.

‘Inside was more subdued. There was a fair-mindedness about us back then, I think, a desire to see a person given a chance to explain themselves. Watson’s delivery was polished, honed over three months of touring, and the audience was eating out of his hand soon enough; and this included more than one or two attendees who had come in only to show their disapproval. Maybe it’s the carefully cultivated Oxford accent, or the dry laconic style he favours, but Stephen Watson in the flesh is hard to see as the devil.

‘He gave us the usual spiel, about the pervasiveness of selection pressures when it comes to crafting complexity, and from there took the usual leap into the dark world of human behaviour. That is, if we accept the brain is complex, then we must accept it too is designed by the same pressures of selection. And if we accept such a mechanism of design, then we must also accept that our behaviour will be drawn towards behaviours which would have favoured reproductive success in the past. Of course one can accept any one of those propositions without being obliged to accommodate the next, but this was more about entertainment than education, and
to give him his due, he was very entertaining.

‘There was time for questions at the end. The first two he took were patsys. The third was more challenging, from a man I didn’t recognise, who was questioning the observational bias of the field studies Watson was quoting. There are two types of presenters, I have found: those who crumple under pressure, and those who revel in it. Watson of course was the second type. He turned on his accuser with a slow spreading smile.

‘“Would you say, Sir, that physics is a reliable science?”

‘“As a rule, although obviously mistakes can be made,” the questioner stammered. He realised then his mistake, I think.

‘“Indeed they can. And do you, on the basis of such mistakes, dismiss the study in question, or the entire field of enquiry? And if it is the former, Sir, as I most sincerely hope that it is, then do you have a specific example of a study I am using where the data has been unduly biased, or were you simply hoping that somewhere along the way I had forgotten to consider such matters as objectivity?”

‘I don’t know if they were the words he used precisely, but whatever the exact expression there was a meanness in them that I found surprising, disappointing even. He didn’t need to hurt this man, whom he would never meet nor hear of again; who was in point of fact grappling with a perfectly reasonable question. But Watson clearly had a taste for blood: it was part of the thrill for him. And he was cheating, as any public presenter can. By avoiding the substance of the question the first time around, he was forcing the questioner to put it again, and in doing so to appear dogmatic. If the questioner stays the course, the audience begins to resent them for attempting to monopolise the speaker’s time, and for ignoring the spirit of the event. A subtle sort of peer pressure is brought to bear, and the questioner crumples. I’ve seen it a hundred times. Few of us would ever agree to take questions from the floor were the odds not stacked this way.

‘Not surprisingly when Watson scanned the room for his next victim there were fewer hands on offer. One of them was mine. I could make this sound a lot grander than it actually was. But the truth is there was nothing preplanned or aggressive about my query. Rather it was an accident. I simply had a head full of Popper, and a question which I wished to hear answered. And I thought he would have an answer. I wasn’t trying to catch him out.

‘Let’s say a hush fell over the place as I stood. I like the sound of it.

‘“What,” I enquired, in the slightly over enunciated accent I had cultivated at international conferences, “is the unique prediction regarding human behaviour that this theory makes, against which it can be scientifically tested?”

‘It is, if I do say so myself, an excellent question, and perhaps I should explain why.’

Richard looked to Amanda for permission to digress, and her shrug told him that he could do what he liked, for nothing educational would make it onto the final tape. Although Amanda would deny it, she was in the end one who led with her heart, and followed with her eyes; tailor-made for the age of sound and vision. Richard by contrast was a dinosaur, slow-moving and wary of warm-blooded slogans. He also took a certain pleasure in loitering in the path of progress. Not today though. The cards were all hers.

‘“If you had been listening more carefully,” Watson blustered, “you surely wouldn’t ask such a question. What is your field of speciality, Sir?”

‘“Mathematics,” I answered, sensing that he was bluffing.

‘“Figures,” Watson replied, and obliging laughter rippled as he scanned the auditorium for another question, presumably expecting me to sit down. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. For he hadn’t answered me.