The Heart Broke In (12 page)

When Alex was a boy his uncle Harry would read to him from a manuscript he’d written for children called
Tales of Life
. He talked about getting it published. The hero of the work was a single-celled organism born billions of years ago who evolved, through many adventures and strange encounters, into a human being. One of the stories was about how the mitochondrion first entered this hero, the sole ancestor of all men and women. The ten-year-old Alex didn’t understand what the mitochondrion was when he first heard his uncle say it, but he loved the word, and the idea of having an ancestor billions of years old made him feel colossal. At school he would advise anyone who fell over in the playground and bled not to let the mitochondrion spill out.

A long time ago
, read Harry,
forty million grandfathers ago, your ancestor the single cell was big and weak and slow, but his neighbour the little mitochondrion was full of energy. And the mitochondrion said to the cell, ‘Let me come inside you and live in you, and I shall make you powerful, and your descendants will be too many to count,’ and the cell said, ‘What’s the catch?’ And the mitochondrion said, ‘I shall give you energy, but when I make energy, I shall put a little poison into you, and it will make you old, and you will die.’ And the cell said, ‘What’s old? What’s die?’ And the mitochondrion said, ‘It is
the end of you. But not yet, and you will have so many children that you will not mourn your end.’ And the cell agreed to let the mitochondrion in, and they multiplied together in the fertile seas of the young Earth, under the young sun
.

Once, a set of sixty trillion of that first cell’s descendants, a set called Alex Comrie, went to California, where a scientist in a laboratory explained to him that it was the mitochondria in human cells, and the toxins they produced as they did their work, that made people old.

He showed Alex a compound, a black powder, which, he said, bonded with those toxins and made them harmless. Not immortality; but, the scientist reckoned from their work in worms and mice, pretty close. The scientist looked round to see if anyone was watching and said to Alex, ‘Try some, go on. Put a little bit on your finger. But don’t tell anyone.’ Alex sucked a dab of the astringent powder and left. And apart from finding, that one evening only, that he was able to drink five beers without needing to pee, the powder had no effect. The beginnings of lines appeared, his skin coarsened and his torso sagged as he approached forty, no faster or slower than anyone else’s. But he did notice, the first time he ate pomegranate seeds after eating the powder, that they had the same tannic astringency, and he mentioned this to Maria.

Soon afterwards she began eating fresh pomegranate for breakfast. ‘Maybe it’ll work,’ she said. It was when ‘Maybe it’ll work’ was their catchphrase, when the doctors who tested them exhaustively couldn’t find anything wrong with either of them and the third IVF cycle failed. ‘Maybe it’ll work’ was anything, swallowing a fly, sex in a hotel garden, accidentally salted tea. Pomegranates. And Alex had wondered whether ‘maybe it’ll work’, for pomegranates, meant conception, or
not getting old; and once he’d asked Maria if she would rather have a child, or live for ever, and Maria said ‘either’.

After the IVF debacle Maria suggested adoption. Or, since it was so important to him to have a child, she said, they could use another woman’s eggs or another man’s sperm.

‘It has to be ours,’ said Alex.

‘It would be ours,’ said Maria.

‘Not in nature.’

‘But you’re a scientist, a medical scientist,’ said Maria, turning red with frustration and struggling to speak through tears. ‘Everything you do is not in nature. How can you interfere with nature to stop people dying and not interfere to let people be born?’

‘Why do I always have to be the rational one?’ said Alex. ‘Because I’m a scientist? You’re profiling. It’s bigotry.’

He knew he might be the infertile one, but what, he thought, if the problem was on Maria’s side? In the secrecy of his heart he compared her to his former girlfriends and imagined how it might have been if he’d stayed with one of them instead, with a little boy or girl by now.

He followed Bec’s work in the journals. He found pictures of her on the Internet and staring at the bright pixels it seemed to him that he felt as he had fifteen years before, without the comforting illusion of those days that he was bound to meet others, like her, who let their true self and their surface coincide.

He turned forty as he approached the end of his research, his explanation for why Harry’s expert cells worked, which other, more practical scientists could use to lengthen lives. His colleagues, and Harry, told him that if he pulled it off it would make him famous and change medicine. Alex laughed
and said that he hoped the beauty of the answer would be worth more than its use, and they thought he was being pretentious, or joking.

He’d read about Bec infecting herself to test her hypothesis, and wanted to have a woman like her beside him. He tried to understand what it was about her, in their short acquaintance, that had left such a mark, and came to the certainty he’d picked up – he had no idea how – that she had a spacious mind. Once this notion lodged in him he found himself noticing how people he met, even young people, seemed able to let a handful of ideas crowd their consciousness. They seemed glad of it, as if the aim had been to fill the cupboards and block the windows of their minds as quickly as possible with the minimum of material.
Finished!
Bec, he was sure, didn’t want to be finished.

In the herding of his theories to their end he summarised the architecture of the human cell and was distracted by the crisp prose of Bec’s description, in a paper in
The New England Journal of Medicine
, of how her parasite got inside a human blood cell. It was as if his cell coasted along, serene in the microscopic cosmos, only to be struck by Bec’s haemoproteus, tearing into the membrane like a runaway asteroid and throwing it out of kilter.

Through the shop window, between the red and white strokes of the letters making up the words UNISEX HAIRDRESSER, Harry Comrie saw Erkin standing alone with his hands clasped in front of him and his shoulders bowed, staring at the point where the wall joined the floor. Harry pushed the door open, tripping the bell and bringing Erkin back to the there and then. The barber smiled, shook a towel and gestured Harry towards the chair.

Erkin was a dainty, short-legged man in a blue surcoat, with deep eyes and a sharply lined face that gave him the appearance of having lived through shocking events, though he had been a barber in north London all his life. His shop was a shrine to neatness. Fingerworn utensils of antique plastic and scratched stainless steel were laid out around the Barbicide like a memory game. There was a warm smell of shampooed roots and, though it was early, sheaves of hair already lay on the worn linoleum tiles under the footrest.

Erkin draped Harry in a dark cape and stood back, meeting Harry’s eyes in the mirror. It seemed to Harry that his head had been severed and laid carefully on a cloth-covered stump. An American friend had told him once that he looked like David Hume. The eighteenth century had been a time of
fairness, Harry thought, when any philosopher, egg-smooth, balding or shaggy, wore a wig. Harry considered how his fleshy, thick-lipped, sixty-four-year-old face would look commemorated in marble. The trustees were too small-minded to come up with the notion of a bust by themselves. He would have to plant it.

‘I want it all off,’ he told Erkin.

Erkin took Harry’s head between his fingertips and tilted it from side to side so that the light danced on the broad bald track of his client’s scalp. Twists of white hair poked out from above Harry’s ears and, Harry supposed, ran crazily down the back of his neck, over his collar.

‘Would you like a number one, sir, or shall I shave it?’

‘Get your razor out. I’m making a fresh start.’

‘A lot of gentlemen like yourself do the same thing, sir. When you get to a certain age it looks better. I’ve seen men come in with half their hair gone and walk out with no hair at all, looking ten years younger.’ He lifted Harry’s gold-rimmed glasses off his face and placed them by the basin. He took the clipper off its hook, fitted a guard, held the clipper up and revved it. He asked Harry if he was sure.

‘Go ahead,’ said Harry. With a few strokes Erkin sliced off the white locks on either side of Harry’s head.
That’s better
, thought Harry, fighting the instinct to go down on his knees to rescue his fallen hairs from the dark mass below.

‘On holiday today, sir?’ said Erkin, raising his voice over the buzz of the clippers. Harry felt hairs being torn off the back of his neck. Half the morning had already gone.

‘I’m the boss,’ said Harry. ‘I go to work when I like. My job’s to think, and I’m thinking now, so I’m working. Cogito ergo laboro.’

‘I didn’t mean to offend you, sir.’

‘The fact is I had a skinful last night.’

‘Celebration, sir?’

‘There was a lot of laughing and singing.’

‘Nice to have a get-together, sir.’

‘I was alone.’

Physically alone
, thought Harry. He’d told Alex about his diagnosis, and then everyone had been on the phone, his son and daughter-in-law, his eldest granddaughter, his brother, his sister-in-law. He’d been solidly drunk by the time Maureen came on the line. He couldn’t remember what he’d said to her. She hadn’t been able to talk for long. She didn’t cry, he remembered that; she was stoical. Or perhaps she’d cried for him later. He liked to think so.

Erkin swivelled the chair, kicked a catch and lowered Harry’s head back till his neck fitted into the groove of the basin. He ran hot water over Harry’s scalp, shampooed the remnant fuzz, rinsed it, wrapped Harry’s head in a towel, brought him back round and lathered him up. He took a cutthroat razor and began to shave.

‘Do you mind me asking what your line of work is, sir?’ he said.

‘I run a medical research institute. The Belford Institute. Up in St John’s Wood.’

Erkin stepped back from his work and regarded his client, foamy razor held at attention. ‘Is it Harry?’ he said.

‘That’s right.’

‘I don’t know why I didn’t recognise you.’ Erkin smiled as he went back to work. ‘You’ve been here a few times.’

‘I have. I know your name.’

‘Harry, yes, Professor. I don’t know why I forgot.’ He
bumped his forehead with the side of his razor hand. ‘My memory. And you know me.’

‘Erkin.’

‘That’s right.’ He shook his head. ‘I should remember because we had a conversation about my aunt.’

‘Oesophagus, wasn’t it?’

‘Oh Professor!’ Erkin wagged the razor at Harry’s reflection in the mirror. ‘You make me look bad. You remember everything. And now I think of it, I told you I was going to make a donation to your institute, and I never did.’

‘We don’t work on the oesophagal side.’

‘No, but …’ Erkin frowned. ‘It’s all part of the what’s, the battle, isn’t it.’

‘Yes!’ said Harry. ‘Yes! Exactly!’ Under the cape he clenched his fists in excitement.

‘My aunt, she passed away. Terrible, terrible.’ Erkin drew in breath between his teeth, shook his head and gave out a pattering of tut-tuts. ‘It’s harder on the ladies when their hair falls out. And then she couldn’t swallow properly, you know? Before she got ill she used to love aubergine, roasted and mashed up with a bit of garlic and olive oil, but she couldn’t look at it in the end. The family all made their aubergine and brought it over and she’d have to say thank you and eat some. She was a kind lady, but she was on so many drugs at the end. My mother held the bowl while she throwing up and said “Oh, these doctors with their terrible medicine,” and my aunt said “It’s not the doctors, it’s your bloody aubergines!”’

Harry began to sweat.

‘I remember, you made a cure,’ said Erkin. ‘It was why I mentioned my aunt, I think. You’re a famous scientist, right?’ He laughed as if the word ‘scientist’ embarrassed him.

‘There are no famous scientists any more,’ said Harry. ‘Thirty years ago I found something out about cells and ten years later we had one of the cancers on the run. It was almost a cure. But it was just one little cancer.’

‘Careful, sir. If you wouldn’t mind keeping your head still.’

‘One measly little cancer. A few hundred cases a year. And all the big cancers still laughing at us. Do you know what I mean?’

‘You want to cure all the cancers, and you only cured one.’

‘Yes,’ said Harry curtly. Erkin had grasped exactly the point he’d been trying to make, yet in the barber’s words he sounded like a failure.

‘When it’s your time, it’s your time, isn’t it,’ said Erkin. ‘It’s in God’s hands.’ Harry hissed. Erkin didn’t notice as he pressed Harry’s head forward to shave between the fold at the back of his neck. ‘I’m not much of a Muslim. I like my beer and cigarettes and I only go to the mosque on holidays. And my aunt, she used to say it was all rubbish. But in the end, you can’t hide, isn’t it. God makes his move and there’s nothing you can do.’

‘Bullshit!’ said Harry. He felt a sting in his neck.

‘Aa,’ said Erkin. He put the razor down, soaked a pad of cotton wool in alcohol and pressed it against the cut. ‘Just a nick, sir. You moved your head and when you spoke like that you startled me.’

‘You’re too fatalistic,’ said Harry mildly. He couldn’t bring the same sceptical zeal to Muslims that he could to Christians, which made him, he realised with sadness, a bigot.

Erkin rinsed and dried his shorn pate. ‘My nephew Alex understands my work better than I do,’ said Harry. ‘He’ll take up the torch. One day we’ll understand it, the whole human
machine, and work out how to make an old body good as new. Don’t lose faith. There are wonders to come. I spoke to Alex yesterday and he told me such a marvellous thing about his work. He’s really found the simplicity in the heart of things.’ In his face in the mirror Harry saw the boastfulness of a child lying about the wealth of his parents.

Erkin took the cape from Harry’s shoulders and gave him a tissue. He handed Harry his glasses and held up the hand mirror for Harry to inspect the back of his head. With his glasses on Harry didn’t need to see the back. The front was enough. Whatever he asked Erkin to do to him, the barber would not contradict him, and would explain how it was a good choice, and how a lot of gentlemen did the same, and how well it looked. Now that it was done and Harry’s head was shaven he did not look clean, streamlined and younger. Nor did he look, with his bumps and veins exposed, like bust material. He looked like an old conscript, the kind of old man who gets called up for the army when a war is almost lost. He looked like a convict, an experimental subject, one of a batch: a half-processed human, ready for the last stage.

Harry was out of the chair and Erkin was at the till with his back to him. Harry squatted down, plucked one of his white curls out from the mess on the floor, slipped it in the pocket of his jacket and stood up. Erkin was looking at him. Harry had moved quickly and he wasn’t sure whether Erkin had seen what he’d done.

‘How’s business?’ he asked the barber.

‘Good,’ said Erkin suspiciously. ‘It will grow back, you know.’