The Heart Broke In (7 page)

‘Is that obvious? Is there a law? Is there a rule? You wouldn’t say it was a lot if I said I made four new friends in one week.’

‘That would be shocking,’ said the friend.

‘So you’re shocked.’

‘You’re a scientist. You’re looking for the kind of certainties in life that you find in the lab.’

‘You talk as if there are certainties, as if it’s an obvious rule that having sex with four men in one week is excessive, and I don’t see that it is obvious.’ She’d raised her voice and became aware that the mothers with toddlers in the café were looking at them. She and the friend leaned in closer to each other.

‘And what about his list?’ said Bec. ‘He wasn’t a scientist, he worked in a chichi coffee shop and made dance tracks, and he was imposing his grid on the world like a system to live by.’

‘It wasn’t a theory, was it,’ said the friend. ‘He was just trying to keep a handle on matters. Look.’ She woke her iPhone and flicked to an app called ManRater. She showed Bec how it assigned points; plus two for being funny, plus one for every £2o,000 a man earned over the minimum wage, plus two for wanting children, minus one for every previous marriage after the first, plus two for being tall, plus two for being big, plus three for being very big.

‘It syncs with your contacts,’ she said.

‘How much is love worth?’ asked Bec.

‘You get plus two if he loves you, and plus one if you love him.’

‘That’s rather sad.’

‘It does seem to set the bar low.’

‘It’s just a game, though, isn’t it?’ said Bec. ‘It’s just scratching the surface.’

‘Surface is all most of us have,’ said the friend, her eyes widening and fixing on Bec. ‘Surface is a lot to be getting on with.’

‘Did you pay for it?’ said Bec.

‘Fifty-nine pence,’ said the friend, and that made them laugh.

Early on Sunday Bec took the Tube to her lab at the Centre for Parasite Control. Through the grubby metal-framed windows of the old concrete block the slats of Venetian blinds could be seen, pushed up slantwise by pot plants, faded sheaves of printed matter and old plastic cutaway models of the workings of parasites, painted in Atomic Age colours of teal, cream, tongue-pink and kidney-brown.

On the third floor she hauled on a buttonless lab coat over her white linen shirt and jeans. In a secure airlocked room five incubators, grey and new and taller than she was, hummed sweetly and their lights shone steadily. They were the reward for her discovery.

‘Why not put them in Dar es Salaam instead of making the stuff here and taking it there?’ she once asked.

Maddie told her the Africans wouldn’t look after them properly. They couldn’t afford the running costs, she said.

‘We can afford them,’ said Bec.

‘They haven’t got the infrastructure,’ said the director. ‘I suppose you’d like to move the whole centre to Tanzania.’

‘That’s where the malaria is,’ said Bec.

Maddie looked at her, seemed about to smile, then leaned
forward and whispered in Bec’s ear: ‘One day they’ll take our jobs. But not while I’m alive.’

Bec put on latex gloves and a mask, took the cover off the hood and switched on the flow of air. She unlocked the first incubator, pulled out a drawer, took the nearest flask and closed the door. The machine gasped as it flushed itself free of oxygen. Bec carried the flask to the hood, sprayed ethanol over the gloves, opened the flask, drew chicken blood out with a pipette, dropped it in an Eppendorf and gave it a turn in the centrifuge. Dotting a clean glass slide with specks of blood, she smeared the blood into a film and dried it with a hairdryer, then fixed the film with ethanol, made up a flask of Giemsa solution, dropped the stain onto the blood and set it aside to take. She pulled off the gloves, tossed them in a pedal bin, took a sterile pricker and examined her left hand. She’d been pricking herself every week for years and the pads of her fingertips were speckled with tiny holes, black with dried blood. Sometimes they hurt a little.

She put on another pair of gloves, held the pricker between her lips, took a fresh slide in her left hand and a piece of cotton wool dipped in alcohol in her right, slipped off her shoes, sat on the linoleum floor with her back against a cupboard and tucked in her left leg. She swabbed her little toe, jabbed the pricker into it, touched the slide against the bright bead of blood, got up, made a film and hopped over to fill a dropper with water. She hopped back to the slides, counted to two hundred, flushed the stain off with water and put the slides on a rack to dry.

When she’d heard that her father had been killed, it seemed obvious to her that he’d died from the intervention of a
not-human force. She knew he was a soldier; they told her he’d been captured, tortured and executed by someone from the other side. It didn’t sound to her as if it could be of the human world.
The other side
was the place where the terrors waited. As a small child Bec had been prone to daylight fears; that the tractor driver, for instance, was trapped inside the cab of his machine because the crows swirling round the plough were attacking him. That the wind making the curtains swing when it blew through the window of their house in Dorset would keep getting stronger until it smashed the family and their furniture against the walls. That when the tap was turned off, and its mouth was open and dry and seemingly empty, something terrible was about to flow out of it, something that was not water and had no human name.

It was in the way of going up against
the other side
that Bec went to the interview room where she persuaded an admissions panel that they had to let her study tropical medicine. ‘What if poor countries were infested with some huge predator, hundreds of thousands of invisible monsters six feet tall who were charging round, tearing the heads off babies?’ the eighteen-year-old Bec asked the panel accusingly, her cheeks red and her forehead damp from the heat of the heavy suit and buttoned-up blouse she was wearing. ‘I think we would have done something about it by now.’

‘What if rich countries were infested with a predator that was tearing the heads off old people?’ said one of the professors. ‘Shouldn’t we do something about that?’

‘Old people aren’t as important,’ said Bec. ‘Everyone has to die in the end.’

The three professors on the panel laughed in a knowing way as if in that moment she’d become one of them, as if they
assumed she didn’t mean it, that she was only shocking them to make them remember her.

Bec put the chicken blood slide onto the stage of a microscope, put a couple of drops of immersion oil on the thick film, turned the nosepiece to the
x100
objective and looked through the binocular lenses at the indigo field of stained serum. It was full of her parasite,
H. gregi
, dark blue dots in the chicken’s blood cells, growing to be killed and made into vaccine. She counted the number of parasites and leukocytes she could see, moved the slide a few microns to the left and counted again. She did this a hundred times.

When she finished with the slide from the incubator, she turned to her own blood. It wasn’t part of the programme, but she liked to keep an eye on what
gregi
was up to in there. She studied hundreds of fields; at field 405 she saw a blurry darkness inside the walls of one of her cells and whistled a fanfare to herself. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘My dear little hypnozoite.’

Bec dallied at the lab, eating crisps from the vending machine. The incubators were full and the data was written up. In the early evening Val called and said that it wasn’t too late, they could still meet. It was essential to Bec that she didn’t lie to Val, yet she had no reason to stay at work. As he talked he steadily lowered a slab of obligation onto her. She felt its weight, and she would either have to come up with a way to make more haemoproteus, or see him.

She saw the face of the security guard on his rounds peeping at her through the view panel in the door and remembered that there were boxes of anaerobic flasks and candle jars in the basement.

‘I still have more to do,’ she told Val.

‘It’s Sunday. You’ve been there all day,’ said Val. ‘If there’s extra work get your minions to do it.’

Bec got the guard to open up the store room and help her carry the boxes upstairs. She cut them open carelessly, ignoring the instructions not to use knives. She pulled the anaerobic flasks out of their sterile packaging and set up an assembly line with flasks, petri dishes, cultures and pipette. One by one she filled the flasks with primed dishes, popped the catalyst in and closed the seal. She emptied her mind of everything but the work. Once she’d finished with the flasks she set about another round of parasite production with the centre’s old stock of candle jars. The flame drifted from point to point as Bec lit candles and placed the jars over them and they gulped down their oxygen and went out until every free horizontal space in the lab was covered in glass or flasks. The lab smelled of burned wax. Bec turned up the extractor fan and put out all the lights except a single reading lamp on the desk in her office.

It was midnight. The lamp shone a sharp yellow disc of light onto the pale varnished pine of the desk and the copy of
Parasitology Today
Bec intended to read, and a wider sphere of dimmer illumination, floating in the darkness, that Bec clambered into with a mug of mint tea. She sat in the padded chair, let down her hair, took off her lab coat, wrapped it over her front like a blanket, tucked her feet up under her, read the first sentence of the first article, yawned, laid her cheek on her folded arms and went to sleep.

Next day at seven in the evening Ritchie drew up outside his sister’s bleak workplace, saw her standing at the gate and tooted. She opened the car door. He could tell she’d spent the night in the lab. Unwashed women, even his own flesh and blood, aroused a primitive fear. Instinctively he put out his hand to stop her sitting down on the new leather next to him, uttered a panicky bleat and faked a reason.

‘Don’t you want to put your bag in the back?’ he said.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Bec. She dropped herself carelessly into the passenger seat, kicking her bag into the corner. It rattled with small things. Ritchie supposed he would find some of these things in the car’s far crannies over the months to come; and who knew what she carried with her when she left that house of disease at the end of the day?

‘New car,’ said Bec, pleased to notice it. The seats, she saw, were a different colour.

‘BMW,’ said Ritchie. ‘I indulged.’

‘That’s OK,’ said Bec.

‘Your Africans could spend years living high on the hog for the price of this.’

‘Sell it, then,’ said Bec.

They drove south. The car smothered outside noise so that
the mass of other cars and trucks around them in the dusk receded and they seemed to pad softly from traffic light to traffic light. It was a good moment, Bec thought, to introduce the secret she wanted his advice on. All she had to do was report to her brother on a certain segment of her real and recent life. And yet introducing this truth to Ritchie in the muffled peace of his car was a great labour, as if she were having to construct a complicated lie.

When Ritchie and Karin’s marriage had been a more volatile thing it had excited Bec to see her famous, beautiful brother and sister-in-law fighting in front of her like heroes of ancient legend, the accumulated layers of tiny indentations left on their bodies by millions of eyes and cameras scintillating as they moved. Ritchie hadn’t begun to pile on weight then, his hair and eyebrows were sleek and black, his cheekbones stood out and the dark patches under his eyes were still smooth, making him look as if otherworldly suffering, rather than crying babies, stopped him sleeping. Now his paunch was fuller and his eyes had sunk more deeply between the lids and into the folds below them. He charmed people by seeming to fight off an agonising tiredness to speak to them.

‘How are the young entertainers?’ she said. She didn’t like
Teen Makeover
and still her brother’s creation and production of the show was a feat she marvelled at. Her imagination approached the complexity of it, the technicians, the presenters, the egotistical teenagers, the demented parents, the journalists, the deadlines, the advertisers, and recoiled. She didn’t understand how Ritchie had time for anything else; she didn’t know how he stopped himself going mad.

‘There was a band from up north,’ said Ritchie. ‘They were good.’

‘Did you pick up a guitar and play along?’

‘What makes you think that?’ said Ritchie. Bec liked to think of her brother jamming with a group of teenagers, but to Ritchie, her smile off into the distance seemed to mock him, addressed, as he had thought when they were young, to an invisible circle of friends, high up and out of his reach, who found him pitiable.

‘You like hanging out with your teenagers,’ said Bec.

‘I don’t hang out with them.’

‘You should. Are we going to talk about Dad now?’

‘Let’s wait till we see Mum.’

Bec looked down and picked at the edge of the seat. They traversed the splicing and braiding of the M23 and M25, the concrete of the flyovers greenly organic in the waning light. On the tall blue motorway signs the white spears of turning off or going on were fat and orderly, like England. In shadow now, with her mass of half-combed hair, Bec seemed to Ritchie to be the resentful teenager who barely lifted her head for years after their father was buried.

‘I wonder why I feel I can tell you absolutely anything,’ said Bec.

‘I’m your brother. You know …
and then there were three.’

‘I think it’s because you’ve spanned the whole range. Selfish brat to good son, kind brother. Cokey screwing-around rock star to loyal husband and father.’

She meant to praise him. Ritchie bit the inside of his cheek, tasted blood, mixed it with saliva, swallowed it and gently cleared his throat.

‘Val proposed to me,’ said Bec. ‘I said I’d marry him and I don’t want to.’

Ritchie liked the idea of dynasty. He liked the sound of
news and entertainment joined by blood, as the foundry and the manor house in days of yore, whenever that had been. Then he thought of sly, knowing, sceptical Val Oatman opposite him at the table on Christmas Day, challenging his power in front of his family. Never!

‘What would you rather do?’ he said.

‘Tell him I’ve changed my mind.’

‘Do it.’

‘It’s horrible. It seems wrong.’

‘It’s normal,’ said Ritchie. ‘It’s not as if you didn’t sleep with him. He won’t be happy, but that’s the game. He hasn’t booked Westminster Abbey. You’re a free woman.’

Bec was silent for a while. ‘Don’t tell Mum,’ she said. ‘Am I that free? How can I be? I spend my time watching single-celled organisms breeding, feeding and dying and wonder how free I’d look on a slide, eighty years in a one-minute animation.’

‘You don’t see parasites driving these babies,’ said Ritchie, patting the dashboard. He pulled over onto the hard shoulder to show his sister the nought to sixty.