In World City (6 page)

Dion didn't wait for any answer. He simply went behind the rock and lay down against it, facing away from the pool. He put his hands behind his head as a cushion against the hardness of the rock and, through half-closed lids, gazed unfocused into the patterns of green and sunlight. There was a brief silence then he heard the soft rustle of falling clothes. “Don't forget,” he called out, “You got to go straight in. Don't even put your toe in else you'll never make it.”

Somewhat to his surprise and pleasure he heard a sudden splash and a loud squeal. He hadn't thought she had it in her.

“It's so cold,” Miranda screamed out between squeals and gasps.

“You gotta move,” Dion urged from behind his rock, “Swim about. Get your arms and legs moving.”

There was a sound of furious splashing and the gasps began to fade. Then there were just ripples he could hear.

“You okay?” Dion called out.

“Hmm.”

She sounded okay. Dion let his gaze unfocus still further.

‘Breathe,' his grandmother had told him, ‘Just do your breathing. You do that and only that and then you get to hear and see what's really there. Not what you want to be there, or what you looking for, or what you don't want to be there, all that. Just what's there.'

Dion breathed like he'd done so many times since his grandmother started telling him things. And, like so many times before, as he breathed, the sounds around him became clearer; and the sensations in his body, and the patterns of light, and the shapes of leaves he could see through his half-closed lids. He could begin to feel the slight variations in the warm breeze that played against the skin of his face. He could begin to pick up the subtle changes in the scents those variations in the breeze carried: the green smell of hot leaves in the late afternoon, the slightly danker smell of moist earth from around the pool, the tang of spray and vapour from the water tumbling over the rocks. He could hear the occasional ripple from the pool as Miranda kept herself floating. He imagined her floating on her back, gazing up through the leaves that reached over the pool, looking into the wide blue of the late-afternoon sky. A bird whistled from close by and Dion felt an overwhelming sense of having been there before. He knew this place, knew that bird, knew the patterns of light he could make out through the fronds of the tree ferns. He knew the sound of the water splashing over the rocks and the sounds of the ripples from Miranda floating in the water. This was his place. This was where he knew his feelings were completely his own, where he could live forever.

Then there was the sound of a dog barking and bodies crashing through the undergrowth. Dion was crouched on his feet in an instant, caught between a need to see who it was, and to keep his word to Miranda not to look. “Someone coming, Miranda,” he called. “You better get out. Shout when you've got your clothes on.”

Whoever it was arrived before Dion got the all-clear, so he was stuck crouching behind the rock.

“I was just having a swim,” he heard Miranda say in response to gruff, anxious questioning.

A man's voice said, “Your father's been worried sick with you gone so long. He sent me and the dogs to track you down. What was it you were thinking of, Miranda? If you want to go off, you need to tell someone. And you don't go off on your own either. This is a wild place. There's no knowing what there is around here. Now, give yourself a rub down with this and get your clothes back on.”

Dion left what he judged a reasonable time for her to get dressed then emerged from behind his rock.

The shock and anger from the big white man and the furious barking of the dogs froze him.

“What the hell are you doing here, you filthy little nigger boy? What's he doing here, Miranda? Did you know he was here?”

And she said, “No, I didn't know he was here.”

Miranda's father invited her to join him for an evening meal. “I need to let you know something of what's going to be happening shortly. Hold off from your usual snack and then we'll be able to talk over dinner. I'll make it early – I've got Lefevre coming round for a drink later – some things to sort out before he leaves tomorrow – and early means you won't get too hungry.”

Miranda hoped this was the first sign of their return home.

She and her father sat together at a small, round table – not like the long table in the dining hall back home which, when her mother had been alive, they had sometimes eaten at together as a family. Physically, this was more intimate, but Miranda felt herself to be in an even emptier space. And the time was later than she was used to eating. And her father began talking immediately. She felt hungry and tense.

“This move hasn't been easy for you, has it, Miranda?”

A shake of the head.

“All the same, I'm impressed by the way you've coped – the complete change from the life you were used to, then that criminal attack on the education net, and that stupid incident with Lefevre's boy. You've been very grown up in the way you dealt with it all.”

Miranda wanted to say what a struggle it had all been. Yes, she had coped. She had coped with this horrid island he had brought her to. She had coped with what came through the screens he had provided her with. But before it broke out into the open, her gathering storm of resentment was deflected by the arrival of the food, and she was able to think more about how she had coped than about how difficult it had been.

Her most difficult moment – the one in which she had felt closest to letting her guard slip – had been when Lefevre's boy had appeared like a resurrection of the dead boy on the invaded screen. Then, just for a moment, her concentration had lapsed and she had allowed a part of the wildwood in too close. Lefevre's boy had got round her defences somehow and it had taken the sudden reappearance of Donnell to bring her back to her senses. Recalling the boy's shocked look as she denied him, she could still feel the contempt for him curling protectively around herself. The boy's face had looked the same as the face of the boy on the screen when he first saw the hooded men. At least Lefevre's boy had not shouted out when she denied him, and he had kept quiet when Donnell started hitting him. All he had done was stand his ground long enough to say, ‘I'm Dion Lefevre and I done nothing wrong,' then slip Donnell's grasp and disappear into the trees. That, she could hold in some regard. The boy had coped like she had coped. He might have been okay. But her father was sending the family away to Europe now.

And would they be following? She gave her father an enquiring look.

He said, “Anyway, it's almost over now, Miranda. There's just one more thing to do, and after that we go back.”

“What do you have to do?” Miranda asked – her first words for some time. She was suddenly anxious at this suggestion of a condition on their return. “Are you sure we're going home?”

“I'm sure – no need for you to worry. But we just have one more thing to get through. There will be three people arriving shortly – and this is important: they are coming to me. I am not going to them – they are coming to me – all the way to this little island. That's how much of a hold I have over them now. Our being here, Miranda, has been part of the way I have gained that hold over them – I have made them understand how much they need to do what I say.”

Her father moved his chair back from the table and cradled between his palms a glass he had been drinking from. He said, “Some time before we left, I found myself under a sudden and totally unjustified attack. The circumstances are complicated. I'll just say that there is a man who works for me who had ideas of his own about how things should be done, and these ideas were simply not part of the work I had in mind for him.”

Miranda's father paused and looked at her steadily, backing up his judgement with a damning silence. He was about to continue, but Miranda, interest aroused now she had some food in her, asked, “Which project was that, Daddy, and what did you disagree over?” She wasn't going to let her father tell it all his way.

Whitlam smiled tolerantly. He said, “Financially, it was actually one of my lesser interests. In fact, it was one of my least – a research institute in Basel. You see, most of what I work with, Miranda, is about buying and selling things so I get the maximum return the market will bear. But I have allowed myself other interests. You remember that old stretch of forest at the back of our house. That brought little return, but I believe it still has possibilities. You see, with some things you know exactly what to expect – like this island, for example. You know exactly how it can be developed and you know exactly what it'll bring in. But something like that stretch of old forest that has had things growing in it for thousands of years, that might just contain something with a use that has not even been thought of yet. Just think of the untapped genetic information there must be in that wood. Hundreds of thousands of years of adaptation have gone into it. There must be things still to be discovered in there.

“And I also have my institutes. People tell me they're run by dreamers, mere thinkers who imagine they're in some old-fashioned, ivory-tower university. People tell me I need to ship in proper project-management practices. But, you tell me, did project managers ever discover anything new – anything genuinely new? No, they're paid to achieve a result that people already know can be achieved. I'm interested in what people don't yet know can be achieved. That's why I have always tried to cultivate things with an element of the complete unknown in them.”

Miranda found it difficult to make sense of much of this – what was maximum return and what was this market that had to bear things? But the unknown that was the wildwood was something she could understand completely. Of course things dwelt in there that could come out entirely unexpectedly – like in her encounter with Lefevre's boy. She wondered why her father didn't see the jungle that surrounded them in the same way. Perhaps it was just too big, too much in the way. The wildwood at home had fences round it and was a site of special scientific interest. Here, it was the jungle that did the surrounding. Perhaps when there were enough holiday homes and golf courses on the island, part of the jungle could be fenced off and declared a site of special scientific interest. Then it might be safe enough to pay some attention. Still, Miranda nodded her understanding, encouraging her father to go on.

“So, it was one of these more peripheral interests of mine that started giving me so much trouble. I have several such institutes in various parts of the world, but the one in Basel – the Hollenbeck Institute – was one that I was especially interested in. Its main concern is longevity research.”

Seeing Miranda's puzzled look, her father added, “Longevity – that means living longer, not growing old and dying so soon.”

Miranda's attention sparked. ‘Not dying so soon,' she heard. ‘How can you do that? What does your institute do to make that happen? Could I learn how to do that?' she found herself wanting to ask.

But before she had time to voice her questions, her father said decisively, “Anyway, it was my longevity research that was at the centre of the conflict I had to handle and it's that research and the way it's financed that is the cause of the three people coming all the way to this island. They're coming to have me tell them what they will do. And while I do that, Miranda, I want you to give me all the support you can. I don't want you disappearing anywhere and causing an upset. I want you here to welcome my visitors and be polite and interested in them. I am going to be making them very uncomfortable indeed and if you can provide them with a little relief from that, it will make it easier for them to do what I say. Now, I think I can hear Lefevre arriving so I want you to slip up to your room before he comes in and I want you to think about what I've said. Can you do that?”

Miranda nodded obediently, got to her feet, gave her father a kiss on the cheek and made a rapid exit in the direction of her room. Once up the stairs, she stopped on the landing and listened. There was the ring of the doorbell, followed by the firm tread of Donnell going to open the door, then her father saying, “Lefevre, really glad you could make it – you must be up to your eyeballs getting ready for tomorrow – come on through.” Then there was a voice she recognised as that of the man who had met them when they arrived on the island, then the sound of the lounge door closing and the sound of Donnell's footsteps retreating to the back of the house where, Miranda happened to know, he would be kissing the maid and feeling her all over. Miranda crept back down the stairs and positioned herself outside the lounge door to listen. She simply wanted to hear anything that might have anything to do with longevity research and she knew that Mr Lefevre was going to Europe, which was where her father was doing his longevity research.

With her ear close to the closed door, Miranda heard the sound of ice clinking in glasses and her father saying, “First of all, Lefevre, I just want to make it clear that the stupid business with your son and my daughter is of no consequence. I don't want anything that a couple of kids get up to getting in the way of what matters. Now, I know you're all ready to hit the ground running but there are some things you may find yourself up against that I don't want you tripping on, things that have nothing to do with what you'll be handling, but a lot to do with me. People may try and use you to get a line on me and you need to be ready to deflect them. The point is, there's an institute in Basel I finance – the Hollenbeck Institute – it does longevity research. It's still one of the great prizes, Lefevre – finding something that can hold back death. There've been plenty of ideas, but none of them has emerged as a clear winner. People are still elbowing each other for advantage, funding, development, further research. So I set up something as fundamental as I could – more than that, I set it up in humans. Most of the work is being done on flies or worms or, at best, rats, but I wanted to set up work that was focused entirely on people – after all, it's people who want to live longer. I made a mistake though. I put in a director who was a scientist, not a clinician. When you're working on people, it's the doctors who have to be in charge. So there was a fight started between the clinicians who were doing the work and the director who was telling them how to do it. I should have seen it coming, but the director – Joseph Mancewicz – Prof Joe – he got there before me. You see, there are several big drug companies with important facilities in Basel and, until some recent rulings, pharmaceutical companies have had to do a lot of safety testing on animals. That's over now – there are effective alternatives – so the companies are left with some extraordinarily well-equipped animal experimentation facilities they have no use for. Joe's plan was to come to an arrangement with the companies so the animal facilities could be turned over to a charity called the Ageing Initiative and used for longevity research, but under his direction, of course. That way, the companies would get early warning of any breakthroughs, Joe would have a non-clinical power base and, with the Ageing Initiative behind him, he wouldn't have to do what I told him. You see, the Ageing Initiative has established itself as the main clearing house for ageing research funds, so it's wealthy and powerful and anyone it funds can afford to give the finger to everyone else. Normally I would have sacked the bastard, but Prof Joe had a hold over me, and he was about to use it in order to make me let go of the institute. It's complicated, Lefevre, but there was a way I could pay for the institutes through the profits from my other businesses, which I could work to quite a considerable financial advantage. But I left myself open to being accused of using the institutes' charitable status for my own ends and Joe was going to make an issue of it. If I had let him, it could have done my wider interests enormous damage. I considered staying behind to fight, but ethical issues are very sensitive and it pays to be out of reach of the press. Much more importantly, though, by choosing to come here I made Joe think he could gain control of the institute without any messy legal battle. It was a good move, don't you think? You see, it gave me a chance to organise my counter-attack.”

Listening behind the door, Miranda thought that in the last few months before they left, her father had looked like a man who was in no position to organise anything – he had looked like someone who was running away rather than setting up some great scheme that would bring important people to this horrid island. But important people were coming, so her father must have changed something. Perhaps he had changed something in the way he had changed things with his hand, reaching out into the starburst at the centre of his computer screen.

Her father continued, Miranda listening carefully all the while. “The first thing I did when I arrived here was to start buying and selling in order to create a very severe storm in the financial markets. The damn markets only remain as stable as they do because everyone behaves themselves and tries to make as much profit as possible. Anyway, I was determined not to behave and it cost me a lot, but it had the effect I wanted. My main targets were the pension-fund agencies, because it's ultimately the pension agencies that control the Ageing Initiative. It looks good, you see. Not only are the funds investing to secure our material future, they're also supporting research so we can enjoy that future more and make it last longer. Of course, it's all so people will want to pay more into the funds. But why not? Everybody benefits in the end. Anyway, the pension funds found themselves with billions being wiped off their value and I told them I would stop the storm if they would change the rules for funding the Ageing Initiative. The proposal I have put to them is that I will pay my research money into their Ageing Initiative fund, providing it is used to run my institute in Basel according to my wishes. Joe is welcome to his animal work if he wants it. He's good and I wouldn't want to lose him. But I need to be in control of that operation. Joe shouldn't have tried to blackmail me. If he'd had the grace to talk about it first, I might have given him more room.”