Fourth Horseman (7 page)

They were so, so cute and beautiful and funny. Every last one of them had a different character, and that was why, as time went by, more of the names began to stick.

Each of the small cages had quick learners and slow learners. Smart squirrels and thick squirrels, I called them, though looking back on it I’m not at all sure I hadn’t got that inside out. As each one got well and truly domesticated they got rewarded by being moved out of the little transport cages and into the huge, walk-in cages that lined one long wall of the room. Whatever I might have felt about Mr Davenport’s project I couldn’t fault the preparations he had made for the animals. They had to be healthy or the experiment wouldn’t work, so their accommodation was the best that could be built. The room was ventilated by narrow grilles high up on the walls beneath the ceiling so the air was constantly fresh. The big cages allowed the squirrels as much exercise as they liked, and each had a choice of warm nest boxes at different levels. Once they moved into those bigger spaces there was a high probability that they would become wilder again, or ‘uncivilized’, so I made myself indispensable at the lab by coming in regularly to make sure I could still catch them all.

There were six of the big cages, and eventually there would be six squirrels in each one, divided by colour and sex. The first of them moved into their new homes about a week after I started working there, but three weeks later there were still a few ‘thick’ ones stuck in the transport cages. One of them was a male grey, that I called Gooch. He used to tease me. I swear he did. When I put my hand into the cage he would come along and climb straight on to it. He would let me stroke his head; he loved being stroked; but the minute I tried to close my hand around him he would make a dramatic dash to the corner of the cage, sending shavings and sunflower husks flying. But he wouldn’t stay there cowering, as he would have done if he was really scared. Instead he would come bouncing straight back and hop up on to my open hand again. I guess he wasn’t so thick, after all.

Anyway, they’re all gone now. I don’t like to think about which ones ended up where. In my mind’s eye I see them all racing away through the branches, drinking the cold, sweet air that only old trees can make.

D
AD NEEDN’T HAVE HAD
any worries about Javed tipping off the animal rights activists. He was probably the last person in the world who would have done that.

I realized that on the first day he came into the lab. It was a Friday evening after school, and one of the first really sunny days of the summer. I showed him around the complex and ended up giving him and Alex a lesson in rodent handling. Alex was keen and was soon up to his elbow in curious squirrels. Javed hung back, reluctant. Eventually I persuaded him to put his arm into one of the cages, but the instant the first baby touched his hand he snatched it violently away and slammed the wire door closed.

‘No way,’ he said, almost running over to the sink to wash his hands. ‘I don’t like them. They are too much like rats.’

He wasn’t keen on animals of any description. He was getting used to Randall, but to begin with he had been very nervous of him and even now, if Randall ran to greet him too enthusiastically he would instinctively throw up his hands and back away. When he was bowling during our cricket matches he would keep a rag in his back pocket for wiping the drool off the ball. He always brought several of them, so that as soon as one got too damp he could change it for a fresh one. I thought it was neurotic behaviour, but after the episode with the squirrels he explained it to me and I understood why.

We were taking a lunch break out on the narrow strip of rough grass between the yard and the woodland. I sat facing the trees. I wasn’t afraid of being attacked by the white horseman but I couldn’t bear the idea that he might be there behind me, watching from the shadows. As long as I could see I was fine.

‘I don’t know how you can stand picking them up,’ said Javed. ‘They even smell like rats.’

‘What have you got against rats?’ I asked him.

‘Not just rats,’ he said. ‘It’s different here. You don’t have to worry about rabies. But we were always taught to keep our distance from small animals.’

‘So you never had any pets?’

‘No. My mother hates them. There was a dog at our place in Sunderabad once but it wasn’t really a pet. We didn’t play with it or take it for walks. It was just there, outside in the servants’ yard. It’s gone now. I don’t know what happened to it. Some people in the city have pet dogs and cats but we don’t.’

‘You had servants?’

‘They are still there, looking after the house,’ he said. ‘That’s the way things are in Shasakstan.’

‘You must be stinking rich,’ said Alex. ‘How come you never told me?’

‘You never asked,’ said Javed.

Alex and I were quiet for a while, absorbing that, then Alex said: ‘Did you ever know anyone who got rabies?’

‘No,’ said Javed. ‘It isn’t all that common. But we heard about cases of it in the area now and then. Sometimes there were scares and all the dogs in the street would be locked up for a while, but I never knew anyone who got it. My mother did, though. When she was young, in her village. There was a woman who died from it. No one knew how she got it because she never told anyone that she’d been bitten. She might have been afraid of the injections they give you, or she might have been too poor to pay for them. By the time anyone knew she was ill it was too late to save her. My mother says she can still hear her screams, when she was dying. It has haunted her all her life.’

We were all silent for a while after that, imagining the horror of it. Dad came wandering by, a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, taking the gentle stroll around the yards that constituted his daily exercise. He ought to have been sixteen stone, the way he carried on, but he was one of those people who just never put on weight. When he was out of earshot I lay down on my elbow in the warm grass. Sunlight filtering into the deep green shadows beneath the trees caught the wings of flying insects. Tiny particles of life.

‘I don’t understand why viruses exist,’ said Alex. ‘I mean, that rabies virus. It’s incredible when you think about it. The way it spreads itself. What it does to its victims.’

‘Its hosts,’ I said pedantically.

‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘But it spreads by making its host bite the next one. How does it make them do that? How did it learn to do that?’

Neither of us could answer. He went on: ‘I mean, everything has a purpose, doesn’t it? Even bacteria can be useful, eating up dead things, making things decay so they don’t litter up the planet. But what use is a virus?’

‘I don’t think everything is useful,’ said Javed. ‘What use is a mosquito? Or a snake?’

‘Useful to who, anyway?’ I said. ‘You sound like you think there’s some grand design or something. Like God worked everything out to suit us.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Alex. ‘I’m just amazed that something so tiny, something that can’t feel or think, can be so sophisticated. How did it figure out how to make people bite each other?’

‘It’s more than that, isn’t it?’ said Javed. ‘Any creature that gets rabies becomes terrified of water as well. The other name for it is hydrophobia.’

‘I know,’ said Alex. ‘It’s mind-boggling when you think about it. I just can’t figure out why something like that has come into existence. What’s the point of it?’

‘What’s the point of anything?’ said Javed. ‘What’s the point of those flies in the trees? What’s the point of us?’

‘Every kind of life is the same, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘It’s main aim is just to reproduce itself.’

Alex seemed quietly shocked by that, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable myself with what I was saying. But I went on anyway, thinking aloud. ‘It’s the basis of everything, isn’t it? Even plants. They grow, they flower, they produce seeds and they die. They have developed fantastic ways of inviting insects to help them spread their seeds but it doesn’t mean they sat down and thought about how to do it. They just evolved like that. Survival of the fittest. It’s the same with everything. Insects, animals, people. Why should viruses be any different?’

‘Do you really believe that?’ Alex asked. ‘That our only reason for being on the planet is to reproduce ourselves and then die?’

I shrugged. ‘Have you got any better ideas?’

‘There are loads of purposes,’ said Alex.

‘Like?’

‘Like helping other people, or like what Dad’s doing: helping other species. And then there’s … there’s …’

‘What?’ I said. ‘Cricket? Aikido?’

I felt mean, as though I was engaging in a kind of mental bullying. But Javed was thinking about it and found the words he was looking for at last.

‘I suppose helping people isn’t really a purpose for being on the planet. Even if you believe in God it’s just a way of getting heavenly brownie points. It’s more like a kind of social behaviour.’

‘Do you believe in God?’ I asked him.

‘My father says people’s religious beliefs should be absolutely private. He says any kind of organized religion just leads to fundamentalism. I think he’s right.’

‘So does that mean you’re not going to tell us what you believe?’

‘What does it matter?’ said Javed.

‘Dead on,’ said Alex. ‘And since we’re all only here to replicate ourselves, I think I’d better go out and start looking for women.’

I laughed. ‘You’re not old enough yet,’ I said.

‘Want to bet?’ said Alex, raising his eyebrows suggestively.

But Javed wasn’t entering into the spirit of it. He was expanding his philosophy, there and then, to fit with the new ideas we were examining ‘It’s the same as the aikido, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Our mistake is to think about things too much. It doesn’t do us any good. It’s like batting. You just have to wait and see what the bowler does. We just have to wait and see what life throws at us and then play it as well as we can.’

‘Beautifully put,’ I said, lying flat on my back, the sun in my face. ‘So let’s just lie here and wait.’

But I couldn’t relax the way I wanted to. As I lay there on the grass I realized that I didn’t trust life’s bowler as I had done before. I couldn’t see the ball in his hand. I was afraid that when that next ball came down the pitch at me I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to play it.

I
HAD BEEN WORRIED
that my cynicism might trouble the boys, but I was the one who lay awake half the night fretting about viruses. I couldn’t get my head around them at all. From what Dad had told us I knew that they were little more than microscopic strands of DNA which replicated themselves by hijacking the cells of their hosts. Anything that had cells could be attacked by viruses. Even plants got them.

And computers. People spent endless time creating them, just for the badness of it; just because they could. Did that mean that someone—some great hacker in the sky or in the fiery depths—had created human viruses? Just for badness? Just because they could? I didn’t believe that for a moment, but I was in awe of the sheer ingenuity of a thing that had no brain; no thought process at all, and yet could send people and animals mad so they had to bite any living creature they encountered. I thought about malaria as well, which got the mosquito to do the work of carrying it, and the plague, which rats could spread around an entire city within days. It gave me the creeps, thinking about those things. The white horseman was big and strong in my mind, still casting a huge influence over everything I thought about. And the fact that Dad was working on the manipulation of viruses was worrying. I didn’t know how, but I was fairly certain that the two were related in some way.

It felt as though I’d only been asleep for five minutes when I was woken by the phone ringing. I looked at my watch. It was six a.m. I was about to get up and answer it when I heard Dad’s footsteps and then his voice reacting with rising excitement to whoever was on the line. When he hung up he came straight to my room. Alex, woken by the phone, was behind him.

‘I have to go to Wales,’ he said. ‘They’ve come across a squirrel that they think has a virus and I need to go up and get some blood from it.’

‘What’s the rush?’ I said. ‘It’s only six o’clock.’

‘Mr Davenport phoned from America,’ he said. Apparently they found the squirrel yesterday but they couldn’t get hold of him until now. The thing’s on death’s door and I need to get there before it dies, and the virus with it.’

‘Can we come?’ I said.

‘I’m not going,’ said Alex. ‘It’s Saturday, remember? Javed’s crowd have got a match.’

‘And I need you to hold the fort here, Laurie,’ Dad said. ‘In any case it would be deadly boring. I’m just going straight there and straight back. I should be home some time in the afternoon. If I’m not you’ll have to go to the lab and feed the squirrels.’

I managed to get back to sleep and didn’t wake up till after ten. I had a long shower and a long breakfast, then pottered around my room, listening to music and pretending I was tidying up. I was just beginning to think about going over to the lab when I heard Dad come in.

I met him in the kitchen and put the kettle on. He swept straight past me, keeping as great a distance between us as was possible in the kitchen. I wondered if I was contaminated, but it was himself he was worried about.

‘Don’t touch,’ he said. ‘Could have squirrel sneeze particulates on me.’

He ran straight upstairs for a shower, and when he came back down his face was bright red from scrubbing and he had changed his clothes. I put a cup of tea in front of him but he ignored it.

‘Have to get this flask straight to the lab,’ he said.

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘Good. We’ll go on the bikes,’ he said. ‘Just in case. I was as careful as I could be, but there’s the slightest chance I carried some of the virus with me into the car. If our squirrels caught it, it could ruin the whole experiment.’

There was a small steel flask in the kitchen with a temperature dial on the side. I watched Dad as he put on a pair of disposable plastic gloves and meticulously wiped the outside with special disinfectant from a brown glass bottle. Then he put it in a backpack and we went out together to the shed.