Descent (23 page)

As always on my occasional visits to the centre, I wasn’t there to see Gabrielle, although I expected to drop by her desk as usual on my way out. I was there to interview Nicola, this time about new developments in sub-dermal tissue regeneration – funding for a major research project had just been announced. Nicola gave me one of her characteristic sidelights on an otherwise routine story: a nugget about some health bureaucrat who’d had an epiphany on the more radical techniques – hitherto regulated with a heavy hand – after a friend had been badly burned in a car crash.

We talked some more, I took the relevant details and we said goodbye. Then I walked to the area where most of the junior researchers and students, including Gabrielle, worked. Here, desks were more cluttered and personal than in the largely admin area on the other side. Gabrielle wasn’t at her desk. Her lab coat was draped on the back of her chair.

‘Gone to the Ladies,’ said a bearded guy at the adjacent workstation. I nodded and waited. After two minutes I began researching more on the story on my phone – not to my surprise, Baxter’s name turned up in connection with it. After ten minutes I started to feel awkward. I wandered off and got another coffee from the machine. By the time I strolled back, Gabrielle was at her desk, hunched over a screen.

‘Hi,’ I said, laying a hand on her shoulder. She started and turned so violently I almost splashed the coffee. Her cheeks were blotched, the skin around her eyes red amid streaky gaps in her make-up.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ she said, her voice sullen and lifeless, then added in a firmer, brighter tone, ‘Nothing to worry about.’ She sniffed hard and smiled. ‘Hello. Good to see you.’

I pulled up a wheeled stool, laid down the cup, and sat down.

‘What is it?’ I said, moving closer and lowering my voice.

Gabrielle glared at me. ‘Nothing. Like I said. I was just upset about something. It’s nothing to do with you. We can talk about it at home.’

I glanced around. ‘Some kind of work trouble?’

‘Fuck,’ Gabrielle mouthed, in a sort of whispered equivalent of a shout. ‘No. Just leave it for now, OK?’

‘OK,’ I said. I took a sip of coffee. I’d never seen her so distressed. I’d seldom so much as seen her in tears. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ she said. Another watery smile. ‘We can talk about this at home, all right?’

‘Are you sure you don’t want to just go home now?’ I asked.

‘For – fuck’s sake,’ she said. ‘No.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘but—’

‘Just go,’ she said.

People were beginning to look. Anyone who didn’t know about us – at least half the people there at the time – might have thought I was pestering her. I touched her shoulder – getting another flinch – and left.

We had a rented one-bedroom flat in Leith, overlooking a dusty, noisy, through-route street with a view across the rooftops of matching rundown tenements facing us, of abandoned waterfront debt-boom developments rising like a gap-toothed row of gleaming teeth spotted with the brown of advanced decay, all now being extracted or drilled and filled by racketing looming cranes day and night. Double glazing, venetian blinds, and air-con made that aspect bearable. We’d made the flat our own and comfortable, furnishing it in the then new New Modern style, and decorating it to Gabrielle’s taste – to which I happily deferred, recognising it at once as better than mine.

I settled down on a recliner, propped my opened phone on an angled holder, and continued working on Nicola’s story and others in my in-progress file. But I couldn’t concentrate, despite a welcome lack of interruptions. Every so often I’d stalk to the window, or make another coffee, or flick to the news or get lost in online byways so far removed from my initial query that I couldn’t excuse them as research even to myself, or retrace with any conviction how I’d got there at all.

At about 4.30 I saved my inconclusive work for the day and answered some emails. That done, I went through to the kitchen and started preparing dinner. Like most people who’d grown up in the depression, we had still to get over the reflex of regarding meat as a treat. I took some trouble grinding and mixing spices and soaking brown rice for a vegetable curry, knowing that the actual cooking wouldn’t take long. By the time Gabrielle arrived at about six the flat was full of the curry’s appetising smell and the rice was almost ready.

She shook raindrops off her coat, kicked off her boots, and without saying a word or looking at me padded to the fridge and poured herself a large glass of white wine. I noticed this because she’d been cautious about alcohol in the past few weeks, saying she needed to be fully alert for her work. The timer alarm went off as she raised the glass and gave me a harsh grin. I smiled apologetically and drained the rice, and before I turned back from the sink I realised what had gone wrong that day.

‘Oh, Gabrielle,’ I said, opening my arms.

‘I lost it,’ she said, weeping into my chest. ‘I lost it.’

Over and over.

I hadn’t suspected she was pregnant, and Gabrielle herself hadn’t been certain. She had just got round to thinking about buying a pregnancy test kit. Neither of us had any superstitions about foetuses, but we felt the loss of what we hadn’t known we had as a small death. We mourned it, then after a time moped intermittently, then recovered, and tried again.

Nothing happened, not even another miscarriage. We each checked ourselves for infertility. The latest over-the-counter kits gave us blue piss: nothing amiss. Neither of us wanted to visit a clinic. We wanted to try everything less invasive first. By the anniversary of our handfasting we were timing our sex lives to a calendar and a clock. At other times we both drank too much. Whisky is a killer. I love it, I still do, but it’s easy to love too much. This was another problem we shared, though we didn’t think of it that way. We thought of it as a solution, a ready medicine for the small inhibitions that had infiltrated our every move and touch and word.

‘You know what our problem is?’ said Gabrielle, tipping a splash of water into a fresh-poured Highland Park on the coffee table one of those nights. ‘You and me, we’re from different species.’

I leaned back into my corner of the vat-grown-leather three-seat sofa – it had been our pride and joy when we’d bought it at Vegan Pelts – and returned her challenging look.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve always known. You’re a fucking Neanderthal. Look at your dad, it’s obvious. Your whole family for that matter.’

I was smiling as I said it, my voice warm to cover the chill I felt inside, the uncanny sense that she had read my mind or independently shared the dark, unavowed suspicion planted in my brain by Calum’s thoughtless flight of fancy and Nicola’s off-the-record briefing.

Gabrielle shook her head impatiently. ‘It’s not that, it’s serious. Of course it’s possible that my family has a tiny fraction more Neanderthal genes than even your average honky. So what? Everyone who’s not of the Pure Race has ancestors who fucked Neanderthals, not to mention all the other hominid relatives we’ve caught hiding in the genome. That’s got nothing to do with infertility. Non-Africans have Neanderthal genes because our ancestors could fucking well
breed
with Neanderthals.’

‘That sounds logical,’ I said, in my best Spock voice.

‘Logical?’ She swigged and laughed. ‘Yes, this is kind of about logic. It’s a pork chop problem.’

I wondered if she’d had a little too much to drink. ‘Uh, explain …’

She leaned forward a bit, an elbow on a knee, glass in the other hand, the bright-eyed didactic Gabrielle I remembered from what now seemed long ago.

‘“Pork chop problems”,’ she said, ‘have nothing to do with pork chops. It’s sort of a nickname, because Charles Dodgson – Lewis Carroll to you and me – first posed that kind of problem as a string of banal statements about various different guys who eat pork chops, are running out of money, rise early, and so on and so on. The question is about making some statement about one of the guys that follows from the premises. Stating the problem takes less than a page, but Dodgson confessed he couldn’t solve it. Turns out you can solve it with some symbolic techniques that Dodgson didn’t have available to him, but that’s not the point. The point is …’ She paused to sip. ‘With me so far?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘The point is, Dodgson had put his finger on a very general point, which is that there are all over the place, everywhere, sets of facts we already know or can easily see, but which we can’t easily see the implications of. I read this in a book by, uh, William Poundstone, I think. There all kinds of truths that might be interesting, if only we could see them. But we can’t, even though all the relevant facts are in plain sight.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘there are all kinds of facts we know or could know, but we can’t see what
follows
from these facts?’

‘Got it.’

I frowned. ‘Isn’t that obvious as soon as it’s pointed out?’

‘Exactly. It wasn’t obvious until Dodgson pointed it out. Or maybe it was Poundstone who clarified what Dodgson had pointed out, which would be kind of another example of what he was saying … Anyway, what all this has to do with species …’ Her voice trailed off, and she gazed away, as if something interesting were on the blank television screen in the corner.

‘Yes?’ I prompted.

‘Species,’ she said. ‘And us. And’ – her tongue flicked across her lips, and she swallowed hard – ‘infertility. Fuck, this is difficult.’

‘I know,’ I said, laying a hand on her knee. She put her hand across mine, squeezed a little, then shifted her knee and took her hand away.

‘Don’t make it more difficult,’ she said. I felt stung, though I tried not to show it. ‘And don’t give me that hurt face,’ she went on.

‘I’m not.’

‘You are. Don’t tell me I can’t see what I see.’

‘All right, all right,’ I said. I took a small gulp and forced a smile. ‘Sorry. You were saying?’

‘Yes. What this has to do with species? OK. The human species is breaking up.’

‘What?’ I closed my eyes tight for a moment, and rubbed my forehead. I didn’t want her to know I knew. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘It’s kind of an open secret in genetics,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s only mentioned in specialist journals and even there it’s put … kind of cagily, right? Because it sort of opens a new can of worms. The human species, right’ – she put down her glass to free both hands for gesticulation – ‘has become so big, what are we now? Eight billion? Nine? Whatever. And even before then, even back when we were just a billion or so, we were the most numerous species of large mammals on the planet.’

‘Yeah, OK, because by then we’d killed off most of the others.’

‘Well, yes, but anyway. There are so many of us and increasing all the time that we’re getting instances of reproductive isolation
by chance alone
.’

I shook my head. ‘That can’t be right. I mean, if various populations had remained separate, like … I don’t know … suppose we – the Europeans, I mean – had never discovered the Americas, or Australia or something, and people had been isolated on separate continents for millions of years, heck even if none of the descendants of those who left had ever gone back to Africa after the migration and no more Africans had ever come out, maybe what people used to call races might have become species. But nothing like that ever happened, and it would have taken millions of years anyway, and people now are … um … interbreeding like never before, so—’

‘This has nothing to do with
races
,’ she said, almost spitting the word. ‘And it wouldn’t have taken millions of years, by the way, there’s ten million years between us and the chimps and what is it, I think the latest count is thirty-two distinct hominid species emerged in that time, six or seven in the last million years alone, so … Anyway, that’s all beside the point because what I’m talking about isn’t like that, except it does involve the same mechanism, it’s just come about in a quite different way. The mechanism is reproductive isolation – groups that don’t breed together, even if it’s just because there’s a mountain range between them or whatever, gradually become
unable
to breed together. What’s happening now is that because there are so many of us,
by chance alone
you’re going to find lineages of people whose last common ancestor was way, way back, time enough for mutations to build up and make them reproductively incompatible. It’s completely invisible until – until two people from these lineages come together, and, and …’

She spread her hands, then put them to her face.

I didn’t move.

‘This is what you think?’

‘It’s not just what
I
think,’ she said, slapping her hands down to her knees. ‘It’s a fact, though as I said it’s … not widely talked about.’

I knew this was true. I didn’t want to admit it. ‘Even if it could happen to humans, which I doubt, it can’t be what’s happened to us. Come on, we’re both Scottish, we’re all Jock Tamson’s bairns—’

‘Oh, Christ! How many times have I heard that stupid phrase?’

‘OK, OK, it’s a cliché but that’s because it’s true,’ I said. ‘Most of us in these islands are descended from people who came into Europe when the ice went.’ I tried a disarming smile. ‘Or maybe before, in some cases.’

Gabrielle moved a hand as if swatting at a fly. ‘As I said, that’s true, but it’s irrelevant. I’m talking about a chance thing – in effect it’s long chains of genetic coincidence like those long chains of premises in pork chop logic, but with enough people it becomes statistically inevitable.’

‘Well how come,’ I said, ‘the problem hasn’t come up before?’

She looked at me as if I were stupid. ‘Who says it hasn’t? Infertility has been around since forever, and it seems to be increasing, or maybe it only seems to be because it’s now seen as a medical problem that can be fixed rather than as a secret shame or a joke or the will of God. Cases of people who were infertile with each other but fertile with other partners … well, it’s not new or unheard of, put it that way.’

I didn’t want to think about the personal implications. I certainly didn’t want to talk about them.