Mendel's Dwarf (21 page)

Or how about this one: searching for a murderer among the whole population of a city?

Ah! You are closer now, aren’t you? You can immediately play the flatfooted policeman and think of some kind of strategy. You know that this person exists, you know what he has done (a serial killer, perhaps), but you don’t know where he lives. You can think of ways you might start, can’t you? How about a door-to-door search, starting at Abbess Close and running through the A-to-Z to end up at Zoffany Street? Takes forever. You want to narrow down the search, increase your chances of getting it right, look only in those parts of the city where he might appear …

Just as the city is divided up into districts, so the human
genome is divided into chromosomes. The first step is to identify the chromosome on which your gene lies. So we find families with achondroplasia and pick through their DNA. Like policemen looking for possible associates of the unknown man, we are looking for specific, known genetic markers and hoping to find one that tends to be inherited with the crime. The genetic markers are known as Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphisms (RFLPs), but they are referred to, always referred to as
riflips
. It sounds like something a jazz drummer might play: “Give me a riflip, man.”

You follow the riflips with radioactive DNA probes. At first it is purely a matter of luck. There are RFLPs known throughout the whole human genome, in every district of the city. It is pure chance whether or not you choose to follow one that is actually linked to the gene that interests you. It may take a few weeks, it may take years. You just keep guessing and keep trying. Like any police investigation, the work is repetitive and painstaking. Like any police work it has its share of luck, good and bad.

Once you have found a linked marker, you find out which chromosome the marker came from. And once you know that, you know in which area of the city the suspect lives. You find other, closer, more intimate associates. And finally you can find the street.

It has taken us one year, almost exactly, to get our first linked marker. It is named, prosaically, D4S412, and it lies on chromosome 4. Precisely, the marker lies in the short arm of the chromosome. We need markers on either side of the gene, we need markers nearer the gene. We can begin walking the chromosome toward our goal. We are closing in, focusing on my own existence. Soon we will have identified the street, and then finally the house number, so that one quiet afternoon when there is no one around, when the children are all at school and the housewives are out at the shops, we can walk up the path to the ordinary front door and ring the bell.

1
. Twenty amino acids, and the command STOP.

2
. Two trivial differences between nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA.

3
. Mendel,
Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden
, 1868.

4
. SDS lysis, proteinase K digestion, phenol/chloroform extraction, ethanol precipitation, and Tris-EDTA resuspension.

5
. PCR using 1 U
Taq
polymerase and 30 cycles of denaturation, annealing, and elongation.

O
ne day Jean didn’t appear at work. I happened to go into the library for something, and she wasn’t there behind the desk.

“Where’s Miss Piercey?” I asked the head librarian.

“Who’s Miss Piercey?”

“Miller. Mrs. Miller.”

The man shrugged. “Phoned to say she was ill.”

I imagined an alluring fever, the cheeks flushed and the bedclothes awry. But later in the morning there was a call put through to the lab. “It’s me,” said a voice. “Jean. Can we meet?”

“Meet? Where are you? Aren’t you at home?”

“Not really.” Not really? How could you not really be at home? The words made me angry. She did make me angry at times, with her willing stupidity, her calculated determination not to understand, not to think for herself, not to realize that she too had a brain. How, in God’s name, could you
not really
be at home? “I’ll explain when I see you,” she said.

“Where?”

“The pub?”

“But why didn’t you—”

“Just meet me there at the usual time. And make sure there’s
no one with you.” There was a murmur of determination there, just a faint gleam of iron. “Just be there.”

At The Pig and Poke I took my drink and a slice of quiche and retreated to what, over the weeks, had become our corner. “The missus left you, has she?” Eric called across as he pulled a pint of bitter. “Hey, how about this one? This’ll grab you. How do you tell the sex of a chromosome?”

“Look up its genes.”

His face fell. “You’ve heard it already.” Then he brightened up as another regular entered. The joke was repeated, with roars of laughter to signal the punch line and gestures of acknowledgment in my direction. “Jeans and genes, you got it? That’s what the professor there does, looks up the sex of genes, isn’t that right, Prof?” he shouted.

I agreed that it was, more or less. A group of Belgian tourists came in to provide a blessed distraction. I turned back to my drink and the disconsolate slice of quiche; and Jean was sitting beside me on the bench. There was an insubstantial quality to her apparition, as though she had not come in by normal means but had slipped, ghostlike, through the walls. She held her head in profile, tilted slightly forward as though she were examining very intently something that lay on the floor in front of her. The mouse-white skin across her cheekbone was reddened and swollen; her upper lip was puffed up, bringing a sudden and unfamiliar irruption to the modest curves of her mouth. “He hit me,” she said quietly. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go. I need help, Benedict.” I’d never realized that weeping could be such a silent thing. As I sat there helplessly, I wondered about the physiological basis for it, that soundless and incessant seepage of liquid from two tiny ducts in the eyelids. It seemed bizarre. I fumbled for things to say, but
they fell to pieces in my hands and I was left only with useless fragments.

“I don’t want to stay here,” she said. “Where can we go?”

“I can’t go anywhere. I’ve got a lecture straight after.” Then inspiration struck. I searched around in my pocket and found the key to my flat. “Here, take this. Take a taxi. Have you got some money?”

She had some money.

I told her the address. “You can rest at the flat for as long as you like. I’ll join you after the lecture. You’re welcome to use the place …”

The tears had become tears of gratitude. How could I tell that? How can tears change their identity? She took the key without saying anything. I must admit to a certain tremor of anxiety. I didn’t want her poking around within the doors of 28A Pearson Street, within the confines of my cave, and coming across my carefully tended collection of unusual photography and videotapes. Was Winsome Wanda, I wondered desperately, still lying with her legs splayed artlessly across my bedside table? But one must take risks in life. “I’ll be back at about five,” I told Jean. “You just make yourself comfortable till then.” Which implied, somehow, that after that I was going to make her uncomfortable. She got up from the stool and turned away from the bar and went out through the door.

“Was that Jean, then?” Eric called. “She seemed all in a rush, didn’t she?”

“Got an appointment.” I turned back to my quiche, no longer feeling very hungry, wondering a whole lot of things. Miss Piercey was no longer mousy; but at what cost?

Doctor Benedict Lambert lectures at Imperial College on the latest developments in linkage analysis and homeobox genes. He
lectures to a packed house, for the diminutive Doctor Lambert, the vertically challenged Doctor Lambert, the deformed and pitiable Doctor Lambert, has, ironically, a growing reputation. There is standing room only. The aisles are packed. People peer in through the glass panels in the doors and see that there is no more space. But don’t imagine for one moment that they have come to hear about the
H
OX
7
gene and Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome. I mean, who would be interested in such a thing? No, they have come to see the performer. Oh yes, I can offer them some good slides of fruit flies with antennae growing out of their heads and mice with stunted legs, but the monster they have come to see is there on the lecture stage, disappearing behind the lecture bench on occasion, cracking jokes about reduced stature in albino mice and showing slides to prove it, waving his magic wand at projection images of a homeodomain protein and how it might bind to the chromosomal DNA during the regulation of gene expression. The spotlight is on the midget; the hanging gardens roar and clap. It is little better than the circus.

Hanging gardens? A literary allusion, gentle reader. Aldous Huxley again. A poem.

And all the time, there is just one thing in my mind, so much so that I muddle up the
HoxA3
gene in mice (complex head and neck deformities) with the
HoxA7
gene (ear and palate deformities), but no one notices—as I pontificate, all I think of is the eponymously named Miss Jean Piercey waiting in my shadowy basement flat. Slightly bruised, she lies, sleeping the sleep of the persecuted, on my bed. The bed is full size; I have a small chair and a lowered desk, but I sleep in the luxurious acres of a normal bed. Lest she awaken, I open the door (lowered handles) with care, and gaze unnoticed on her sleeping form. Her mousy hair is strewn across the pillow. Her mouth is half open and her breath (sour, tainted with fear) rasps gently between bruised lips. One hand cups her cheek, the other lies abandoned on the sheet. Miss Piercey. Snow Gray lying beneath the breathless gaze of her
single, admiring dwarf. She has cast aside her dress and is wearing only a slip. Her legs are spread apart, almost as though she is caught in midstride running some desperate race, and her slip is caught up in all this silent rush so that the silken skin of one pale thigh gleams in the pallid afternoon light that filters
down
into the basement from the upper air. If I incline my head I can peer up into the scented shadows beneath the slip and glimpse pink flowers gathered there, a bouquet of sweet pea lain on a white cotton ground.

“Oh Christ, it’s you!”

A curious ejaculation, given the circumstances. Fright? Disappointment? Relief? Who can tell? “I must have been flat out,” she says, sitting up, arranging her skirts so that silken thighs are no longer exposed, but only the twin oysters of her patellae. Had she noticed the thoughtful and reverent inclination of my head, bowed as though before some idol? “God, how embarrassing.”

Is it? “I’ll make some tea,” I suggest hurriedly. “You want some tea? Then you can tell me all about it.”

But first? First, trapped by the exigencies of human physiology, I must repair to the bathroom and unzip my trousers and see again in my breathless memory those sheer thighs, that small cluster of flowers. “I’ll do the tea,” she calls through the door. I mumble some kind of reply. Nacreous, traitorous fluid lies in glutinous strings across the bidet. “If I can find the things,” she adds.