The Heart Broke In (14 page)

‘Do you honestly think that after Shane dies he’s going to be tortured for an infinite amount of time because he lifts another chap’s shirt to get his kicks?’

‘That’s the path he chose,’ said Matthew. ‘I’m not saying I understand it. If it was up to me, I’d save everyone.’

‘I already saved him!’ said Harry, jingling the coat of his nonexistent dog in his son’s face. ‘I saved that man. Not God. Me!’

Alex flew over the nucleus of a human cell, looking up along the shafts of microtubules that vaulted towards the distant, quivering sphere enclosing the cytoplasmic ocean, turning back to see the curving ridges of the Golgi apparatus release flocks of glittering proteins, each closing in on itself, like millions of open hands curling into fists. He delved inside them and each protein revealed itself as a form on the cusp of life and chemistry, a device of exquisite intricacy and precision, and he counted the revolutions of the atoms as they twisted and aggregated, key biting key biting key. He saw it partly as a vision, as through murky water lit by shafts of sunlight, partly as biomathematical values and partly by the physical mnemonics under his fingertips. It took him great effort to get there and he could never hold it for long – for less time now, when there was so much change in the world outside his head.

On the threshold of Alex’s study, Maria watched him. He sat hunched with his back to her, a pen in his left hand, making sharp, short strokes that didn’t look like writing. With his right hand he lifted, turned and rearranged a set of objects on the desk: a child’s watering can, a toy rooster, a pair of interlocking wooden rings, an egg timer, a clockwork dolphin.
Scattered in front of him, around and on top of his computer keyboard, were the brightly coloured spheres and metal rods of a molecular modelling kit.

He came to the surface, singing a transition jingle he didn’t know he sang.

Imagine for a moment

Real fruit as chewy as Fruitella

He realised Maria was in the room.

She said: ‘I’ve got an idea. We could separate and look for other partners while we’re young enough.’

Alex’s forehead creased and he smiled and leaned towards her. ‘I can see the advantages of that, and I can see three things against it,’ he said. ‘First, I’d miss you. Second –’

‘I wish you’d stop making cases when I try to talk to you,’ said Maria. ‘And I don’t like that expression. Can’t you pay attention to me without putting on that hawk face? You smile and frown at the same time.’

‘You don’t want to separate?’ said Alex.

‘You obviously do.’

‘You brought it up.’

‘I wanted to see what you thought. Now I know.’

The realisation that he’d wounded his lover there and then seemed more painful to Alex than the possibility of future regret. He agreed easily to Maria’s idea that they should stay together, living in Maria’s house in Mile End as they had for eight years, sleeping in the same bed, having sex as before, until one of them found somebody else. It would be easier that way, said Maria. They wouldn’t be lonely, and it was well known that people with partners were more attractive to others than people who were by themselves.

A month of peace and serenity went by on these terms, as
if they’d solved something, and Alex lost his way, then found it, in the shoals and narrows of the cell. But when he finished the draft of his paper and sent it to his colleagues at Imperial and to Harry to see what they made of it, it seemed to him that he and Maria were worse off than before. They still had no child and no prospect of having one. The theory of togetherness, tenderness and solidarity while they waited for one of them to be struck by love’s thunderbolt was good, but what did it mean in practice? He suspected Maria wasn’t really looking. Since he and Maria had been together, he’d met women he liked, but did he want to live with them for the rest of his life? Most women he met and liked were in the possibly-love category, but how, he wondered, could he bring possibly-love home to Maria?
I’ve met someone I might fall in love with. Let me have a week in France with her and if it works out I won’t come back; if it doesn’t, see you Sunday
.

He wondered if Maria had given him a licence to cheat and lie, or if she’d challenged him to have the guts to leave her, and concluded she’d done neither of these things. If before he could have made friends with women without her being suspicious, any new woman friend he mentioned now would be assumed to be a candidate lover, a threat. She’d given him the illusion of freedom and by doing so clutched him closer.

He’d been unwise about money, too, he realised. Maria had told him so from the start. He spent and gave and didn’t invest. It seemed to him he was paid too much. His salary came in each month and it felt like plenty. He hadn’t thought it meant anything to her until he told her he’d lent his entire savings to his brother, a hundred and twenty thousand pounds, to pay off a gambling debt. How furious she’d been, as if he’d robbed them. She was right, Alex supposed. She was right to
think about the future, to be ruthless towards brothers-of-lovers who got themselves in trouble, to protect what they had so that their children would grow up safe, well fed, knowledgeable, in light and greenness. The look in her eyes when he told her, just as the IVF was starting, that had been something: savage as an animal whose mate had just eaten her young. And yet, it seemed to Alex, it was only money. He paid Maria rent each month, and had never asked for a share of the house; she’d never offered one.

One of the trustees from the Belford Institute asked Alex to help draw up the guest list for Harry’s valedictory pre-Christmas party. When he’d almost filled his quota Alex called Ritchie and asked for Bec’s email address.

‘She’s in Africa,’ said Ritchie.

Alex thought back over what he’d said, working out if he’d been rude. He thought he must have caught Ritchie at a bad moment.

‘I want to invite her to a party in December,’ he said. ‘It’ll be mainly science people there.’

There was silence on the end of the line before Ritchie said warily that his sister returned from Tanzania on the tenth.

‘Perfect,’ said Alex.

‘Scientists have parties, do they?’ said Ritchie. ‘Yes, we do.’

After another long silence Ritchie gave up the information.

‘How is she?’ said Alex.

‘Busy.’

‘Is everything all right?’

‘Bec’s very dear to me.’

‘Have you two fallen out?’

‘As a matter of fact we’re closer than ever. She’s a special girl. She’s doing important work. I don’t want her to be …’ He didn’t say what he didn’t want her to be.

‘Should I invite her boyfriend?’

‘She hasn’t got a boyfriend. No time.’

Alex’s heart speeded up. ‘She was going out with a newspaper editor,’ he said.

‘Oh no. That’s finished, ages ago, all over, nothing to do with him any more. Didn’t work out. It’s just the vaccine for her now. Back to London for a few days, then Africa for the long haul. I doubt she’ll have time for parties. Don’t bother her. Really, Alex, best not. Listen, I’ve got to go, but let’s catch up soon, yeah?’

Harry had come at the boy Alex with the confident glow of the big city, an impatient, sceptical Londoner trampling through the thistly intellects of a small Scottish town on his way to the rare orchid of his nephew’s mind. He wore pink shirts with white collars, took phone calls from America in the middle of the night and brought a rich gush of aftershave, cognac and tobacco to Alex’s underheated home, with its thick stone walls and condensation on the inside of the windows. Alex’s parents had an out of tune piano in the living room that only Harry played. When he came to stay Harry would sit there in the evenings playing jazz, letting the ash from his cheroot fall on the keys, singing in a cracked voice and looking over his shoulder at Alex’s mother. Alex despised jazz. At that time there was only The Smiths for him. But sometimes the sound of Harry singing It’s The Rhythm In Me would sneak into Alex’s room from downstairs, Harry’s squat fingers hammering the low keys, and Alex wouldn’t be able to resist riding along with it, picking up his sticks and joining in.

Harry told Alex that there was no mystery science wouldn’t penetrate. Wonder in the face of natural marvels was all very well, he said, but it was no substitute for understanding. He
would turn up on Saturday mornings off the sleeper from Euston and take Alex and Dougie on walks in the Grampians or along the Angus coast, lecturing them, according to what they came across, on the genetics of heather flowers, the prismatic quality of the rainbow and why natural selection made the hare’s coat turn white in winter. He disparaged the local churches as monuments to ignorance and, with rhetoric so loud and abrasive that sheep looked up from their grazing in alarm and moved closer together, demolished a series of silent, invisible opponents attempting to prove the existence of God. The walks ended with a search for Dougie, who would wander away by himself while Harry answered Alex’s close questions and would be found fishing for sticklebacks with his fingers, pelting rocks with rowan berries or skimming stones off the waves.

In Alex’s fifth year at the high school Harry invited him to stay with his family in London for a week. On the eve of his journey south Alex saw his uncle on TV talking jauntily about his work, about taking cells from cancer patients’ bodies, altering their genes and putting them back. He wasn’t like the scientists Alex was used to seeing on television, stiff, nervous and suspicious. Harry laughed, leaned back in his chair and silenced the interviewer with a clever riposte. He seemed to Alex to be a master of life, shaping other people’s will as lightly as he shuffled the molecules determining how long they lived. And yet when Alex sat at the supper table with Harry’s wife Jenny and his son Matthew, his uncle was tense and curt. Aunt Jenny was a massive, gloomy woman who barely spoke and never smiled, her face half-covered by long black hair interspersed with crinkled strands of white. On the first night Matthew, who was Alex’s age, wore
a t-shirt with the words JESUS DIED FOR OUR SINS printed on it in fat red letters. He had a chunky Celtic cross on a thong around his neck and was trying to grow a beard. Before the meal he asked Alex if he wanted to say grace and Harry told his son sharply: ‘I told you, your cousin’s an atheist.’

‘Are you?’ Matthew asked Alex.

‘I think so,’ said Alex.

‘You must let Jesus into your life,’ said Matthew, dropping his eyes to the table and picking up a piece of bread.

‘Why should he?’ said Harry, and said to Alex: ‘Don’t pay attention to Matt, he’s been brainwashed.’

Jenny looked from face to face and a whimper came from her, like an animal in pain.

Matthew clasped his hands together, bowed his head, closed his eyes and said: ‘Dear Lord, we thank you –’

‘Some wine, Alex?’ said Harry, getting up and lifting the wine bottle towards his nephew, making it clink noisily against his fork and plate.

‘– for the food and drink you have given us to eat today. Amen.’

‘Abracadabra,’ muttered Harry.

‘I will have some wine,’ said Alex.

Jenny sighed, sniffed and in a tiny squeaky voice said, ‘Oh God.’

Harry mentored Alex far into his career, through his masters, his doctorate and beyond, swallowing his feelings each time his nephew surpassed Harry’s understanding of his work. Harry thought his nephew had no politics. He thought Alex’s contemplative self, which seemed dreamy and aloof, and his enthusiasms, which came so unpredictably,
made him a bad collaborator and a useless leader. But when Alex came back to London from America in his late twenties, preceded by whispers out of Johns Hopkins that post-grads had started calling him
the sage of cell function
, other scientists in his field sought him out and listened to what he had to say. They were mired in grant applications, slide-show presentations, meetings, panels, conferences, committees and the gnawing, competitive hedonism of London, and the appearance of a man who seemed to do nothing except think, write and teach, with occasional outbursts of quaint philosophising, was like the coming of a visionary, even before they paid attention to his theories. His Scottishness gave him a touch of otherness to which the London scientists, clumped together from big cities around the world, were susceptible, as if he had drunk some special water up there. A rumour spread that Alex had taught himself maths and cell chemistry as a child.

In the ten years following his nephew’s return, Harry had misinterpreted Alex’s reputation as power, and confused his authority over scientific theory with authority over people. Now that his diagnosis only gave him a short time to live he became preoccupied with passing his job on to his nephew. He began a campaign at the institute to be sure the trustees’ wariness of nepotism wouldn’t stop Alex being head-hunted to succeed him. He didn’t meet much resistance. The trustees agreed that Alex was the obvious candidate.

The trustees told Harry that they thought his illness was terribly unfair.

‘Not getting cancer is just as unfair,’ said Harry. ‘But nobody complains about that.’

Outside Whitechapel Tube station, under the striped awning of a vegetable stall, a woman in full-on niqab ran her fingers, sheathed for modesty in black gauntlets, over the puckered skin of a bitter gourd. The stallholder watched. He’d zipped his leather jacket to the neck and pushed his hands deep into his pockets, pawing the ground with frozen feet. The awning flapped in the wind and the air ambulance clattered overhead towards the roof of the Royal London. The stallholder didn’t suppose the woman would buy his vegetables. She was a gourd-stroker, a melon-tapper; she wanted to draw his attention to her fingers, knowing that the more she hid her skin, the more it turned him on.

His eye wandered to the Tube entrance, where a little dog appeared, dressed like a gladiator. Close to his ear a ripped young preacher of the Qur’anic word in a black army-surplus jacket, combat trousers and laced boots, fronting up in his first full beard, kept calling out, ‘No running away from death!’ A cluster of teenage seminarians loitered by the edge of the pavement, thin, nervy and big-eyed like deer, in ankle-length tunics, parkas and white filigree skullcaps. The preacher, who’d positioned himself so that anyone trying to cross Whitechapel Road to get to the hospital would have to pass
him, was handing out one-page tracts printed on the madrasah inkjet.

‘No running away from death!’ he yelled. An old kafir slaphead in a mohair coat with a fleshy, pear-shaped face strode importantly towards him. The preacher looked down at the animal the kafir had on a lead, a small white and brown dog, dressed in a studded leather jacket.

‘I am not running away,’ said the kafir, who had stepped to within six inches of his face while the preacher was distracted by the dog. ‘D’you think I’d set foot in that charnel house if I was afraid of death?’ He nodded at the grimy yellow brick of the hospital, and set off towards it.

‘Listen to what we’ve got to say, then, bruv!’ called the preacher, thinking how boldly the kafir had come to him, and how forlorn he looked now from behind, walking alone with his dog trotting all pimped out beside him.

The preacher turned back to the crowd pouring out of the mouth of the Tube. ‘No running away from death!’ he shouted, and a tall kafir looked intensely at him and took one of his tracts as he passed. In his eyes the preacher saw something of the old slaphead who’d just gone by. Were they all beginning to look the same? ‘Lot of distressed kafirs today,’ he said, and the seminarians giggled, repeated the word ‘distressed’ and danced on and off the edge of the pavement.

Alex folded the sheet of paper the preacher had given him, crossed the road, passed through the portico of the hospital and asked at reception for Harry, who’d been due for an appointment that morning. They said they couldn’t help:
patient confidentiality
.

Alex looked around the almost empty waiting room and went through the swing doors on the far side to a small public
garden with a bench, a handful of scrubby trees and a bronze statue on a high plinth. The garden was overlooked by brown-brick hospital buildings covered in netting. He was clumsy and half-blind with anger.

Deep in a cranny in the human cell, Alex’s Swiss collaborators had discovered a set of enzymes whose purpose he had, after a decade of work, understood: they were time counters, measuring the speed of change on the microscopic level. In the paper
Nature
was about to publish he called it the chronase complex. The reason Harry’s expert cells worked, Alex found, wasn’t that they sensed the different appearance of cancer cells; they spotted that cancer cells were working at the wrong speed, and marked them for death. It opened up new worlds for medicine, but it was the intricacy of the chemical mechanism that delighted Alex, and the notion that every human being contained sixty trillion clocks, counting units of time too small for any man-made machine to measure. He ended the paper by speculating that the system wasn’t necessarily reset to zero at conception; that the count might have continued, unbroken, from the moment evolution set it in motion, a billion or two years ago. This was already going out on a limb. Now Harry, who’d seen an early draft, was trying to make him go further. It seemed to him that Harry had violated his inner world.

Maria told Alex he spent too much time in that world. He had no ordinary adulthood, she said; he only came out of himself as a child, distracted by a trivial novelty, some bright colour or pattern or catchy tune, or as a worried old man, shaken to his heart by an emotion that seemed to him like the end of the world – love, anger, jealousy, the longing for an heir. ‘I don’t know who you’ll shack up with after me,’ she
said, ‘but if she wants your attention I’d advise her to have a kazoo and a shotgun handy.’

‘It’s work,’ said Alex. ‘I’m exploring. I’m paid for my mind to be elsewhere.’

Alex sat down on the bench and unfolded the piece of paper the preacher had given him. A man doesn’t die of diabetes, he read, or from drowning; he dies because the lifespan allocated to him by Allah has come to an end. The tract quoted the Qur’an:
When their time (Ajal) comes they will not be an hour late or an hour early … Wherever you may be, death will find you, even if you are in fortified towers
.

Alex looked up. A young man in a satin-effect bomber jacket was squatting down under the trees, trying to use the flame of a lighter to burn off loose threads wisping out from the hem of his jeans, but the gas wouldn’t catch. He straightened up and walked over to the plinth, asking if he could borrow the lighter of someone Alex couldn’t see. A small dog yapped and a Jack Russell dressed like a Roman soldier came out from behind the plinth and skipped towards Alex.

‘Gerasim!’ shouted a voice, and Harry appeared, a lit cigar and a lead in one hand, a lighter in the other. He gave the lighter to the young man and the garden filled with the smell of cigar smoke and burning cotton. The dog trotted towards Harry, who put the cigar between his lips and held the lead out to his nephew.

‘Put the lead on him, will you, Alex? I can’t bend down.’ He looked around as if he were seeing his surroundings for the first time. ‘They sent me to the wrong hospital. I should be in Barts.’ He’d lost weight.

‘I’ve been looking for you,’ said Alex.

‘It’s not the smoking that’s habit-forming, it’s the going into hospitals. Once you start you can’t stop.’

‘I got a phone call this morning,’ said Alex.

‘Look at this,’ said Harry. He led Alex to the plinth and showed him a bronze relief. ‘There’s Queen Alexandra,’ he said, pointing to the image of a corseted, bonneted woman with her hands in a muff, bending over a patient. ‘Do you know what that is?’ He tapped his finger against the representation of a barrel-shaped object with telescopic tubes projecting from it. Edwardian nurses were applying the ends of the tubes to patients’ heads. ‘That’s a Finsen lamp. They used it to treat lupus. Alexandra gave them one in 1900, first in Britain. This Finsen, you know, he got a Nobel prize for that, and he was only forty-two. Not much older than you. You look peeved. What were you saying about a phone call?’

‘I got a phone call this morning from the editor of
Nature.’

‘He’s a friend of mine.’

‘He said you told him I was being coy. That I was hiding the meaning of my paper, that I didn’t want to spell it out.’

‘The Columbus of the human cell,’ said Harry. ‘He set out to find India, and he discovered a new world. But he still insisted it was India.’

‘He talked as if I was trying to cheat him out of a scoop. He said you told him I’d discovered a way to stop ageing and was too embarrassed to say so. I wish you hadn’t done that. I wrote what I meant to write and I didn’t show it to you so you could go behind my back to get it changed.’

‘Your paper explains why cells die. People are made of cells. Ergo, you explain why people get old and die.’

‘I do no such thing.’

Fear glittered in Harry’s eyes. ‘You’re not making the connection between what you’ve discovered and extending human lifespan. It’s all there! You’ve written it! You’re not joining the dots.’

‘I’m not trying to extend human lifespan,’ said Alex. ‘It’s long enough already.’

‘Mine isn’t,’ said Harry.

‘I want to understand how it all works,’ said Alex. ‘That was what you always told me I should do.’

Harry pointed at his midriff, where his tumour lay. ‘I’m sick of understanding,’ he said. ‘It’s time to interfere.’

‘There was never going to be anything in my work that would help your condition, not until they’ve slogged away in the lab for another ten years.’

‘What’s the matter with you? Don’t you want to heal the sick? Why shouldn’t we live to be two hundred?’

‘Our lives can’t be long enough to make us happy,’ said Alex. ‘We can only live for ever by replacing ourselves.’

‘Can we all replace ourselves?’

Alex’s cheeks burned. ‘I’m working on it,’ he said.

‘You told me you’d found the key to immortality.’

‘I got carried away. I said I’d
seen
the key to immortality, not
found
it.’

‘Even a weasel would have trouble getting through that semantic hole. You thought you’d say something nice to me because I told you I was about to kick the bucket. You thought I’d snuff it before I read your bloody paper.’ Harry smiled a sugary smile and cocked his head. ‘Why don’t you add a final phrase to your paper, just a signpost: “… and has potential to delay or suspend human ageing”. Isn’t that where your findings take you?’

‘Maybe, if the whole planet worked on nothing else for a generation.’

‘You act as if fame doesn’t matter to you, but I know you’re proud,’ said Harry.

‘Don’t you ever stop manoeuvring?’ said Alex.

‘I can’t help it,’ said Harry. ‘The need to be strong, to want advantage and fame, these are natural instincts. Men are born with them. They make men men. That’s how they know they belong in the world.’

‘I’m not like you.’

‘I’m only thinking out loud,’ said Harry mildly. ‘Whatever happens, you still have your mind. As for the human instincts, you either have them or you don’t. I’d always thought you wanted to be in the great rhythm of things and not be a man set apart. It’s up to you. But why not take the fame? Why not be a king?’

Gerasim barked, a high, piercing yelp, and Harry shushed him.

‘He always wants to be the centre of attention,’ said Harry. ‘Come on, a last favour. “And has potential to delay or suspend human ageing.”’

‘If
Nature
publishes that the headlines will say “Scientists find fountain of youth.” And I haven’t found it, and I don’t want to live forever.’

‘Forever is a long time to draw a pension,’ said Harry, tugging on Gerasim’s lead. ‘But I’m not even sixty-five. I’m too young to die.’