The Heart Broke In (6 page)

‘Well done,’ said Bec.

‘Oh, we do what we can. I had to let them medicate him. That’s supposed to stop him getting messed up and self-medicating with narcotics. Everyone knows that, right? It’s drug against drug in America. Everyone knows it, and when everyone knows something, nobody does anything. So now Mom’s back in the jungle, trying to find something to help kids in Mozambique live long enough to contract marketable mood disorders. I’m sorry you left us.’

‘I am too,’ said Bec. ‘Personalities, you know.’ She wasn’t sure what Franz had told Ruth about what happened.

‘And now you’re working with the squatters,’ said Ruth.

‘Those birds they keep are sick birds of paradise,’ said Bec, joyful to have someone to tell. ‘The squatters say having them around protects them from malaria. They came from the hills where the Japanese were. I think this is it. I wish you could help me.’

Bec had the impression Ruth wasn’t listening.

‘Good luck, honey,’ said Ruth, fiddling with her car keys. ‘I gave you such a chance. I can’t believe you turned him down. I’m so in love with that man. I hate to see him disappointed.’

‘I told myself, “He’s Ruth’s guy.” There’s a rule that says you shouldn’t fool around with other women’s husbands.’

‘Are you saying there’s something wrong with me?’ said Ruth, and her voice was a little louder and higher, like a bad-tempered child’s. ‘How could you fail to break that rule? How could you resist him?’

The sick fowl of the shanty town, Bec discovered, were a species called von Hausemann’s bird-of-paradise. The immunity to malaria of the squatter tribe that kept them had remained secret; health workers didn’t visit much, and they didn’t lack diseases, including the chronic vision problems of the adults. Bec found the Japanese scientist’s biting fly in the camp in abundance. All she was missing was the parasite. She’d drawn up a plan to take blood samples from the squatters when she got infected.

One day her head began to ache and though it was hot and humid in town she shivered with cold. She took some paracetamol and went to bed. A lurid, feverish dream chased its tail in a night that had the weight of weeks. In the morning she peeled off the damp sheets and got up. The dizziness made it hard to stand. She drank two glasses of water, meaning to call the hospital, but the water made her feel better, and by the time she sat down at the microscope, she was left with a blocked nose and a sore throat.

She examined hundreds of fields of her blood. She found nothing non-human. That night the fever returned. She went to bed with a temperature of forty.

She woke up at dawn with her head swimming. She slipped
out of bed onto the floor and crawled on her hands and knees to the part of the house she used as a lab. While she was making a blood slide her body shook with fever and she pressed her wrists against the table to keep them still. A drop of sweat ran down onto the top of her lip and she licked it off. She got the slide ready, put it on the microscope stage and passed out. When she woke up, hours had gone by. Her head had cleared and she was hungry and thirsty. She made a jug of coffee and sat down at the microscope.

On the third field, she saw that one of her red blood cells had been invaded by an alien creature. The parasite was smaller than the plasmodium that caused the local version of malaria. It looked like a species of haemoproteus, but not one she could identify.

The fever didn’t come back. Bec flew to Australia for tests and consultations with other scientists and between them they worked out that she’d been infected with an unknown species of haemoproteus; that the parasite seemed to have entered a dormant stage and become a hypnozoite. The doctors suggested drugs to flush the parasite from her system. She declined.

Bec sent details of her find out to committees and one evening she got an email with the last approval she’d been looking for. She called her mother and told her that she’d discovered a new species.

‘That’s wonderful, darling,’ said her mother. ‘What does it look like?’

‘You can’t see it with the naked eye,’ said Bec.

‘Oh.’

‘You have to have a microscope.’

‘I saw a documentary about PNG last week. They found a new kind of tree kangaroo. It was adorable. It had fruit in its
paws and it was eating it, like a little boy with an apple. Perhaps you’ll find something like that.’

‘I named it after Dad,’ said Bec. ‘It’s going to be called
Haemoproteus gregi.’

‘What?’

‘Haemoproteus gregi
. As in Greg. As in Dad.’

‘Your father was only really interested in dogs and horses. And fish, I suppose.’

Bec bit her lip. ‘They don’t find a new species of invasive parasite every day,’ she said.

‘You named a parasite after your father?’ said her mother. ‘How could you do such a horrible thing?’

Bec had stopped taking malaria pills, and let her wrists, ankles and neck lie bare in the evening. The mosquitoes feasted on her, and she didn’t get malaria.

When Bec came back to London, the centre wasn’t sure what to do with her. They obtained money for her, an important-sounding title and a lab of her own, but told her they couldn’t support her infecting healthy people – young children! – with one live parasite in order to ward off another. To show how effective
gregi
was, Bec sat in the centre’s secure, windowless insectarium and let herself be bitten and infected with the more vicious African version of malaria. It caused her nothing more than a runny nose, but she only made the director angry.

‘You’re lucky not to be in permanent quarantine,’ Maddie, the director, told Bec. ‘You have no idea what that thing’s capable of.’

‘Stopping malaria,’ said Bec.

‘Look what it’s doing to your eyes.’

‘They go a bit blurry once in a while. It’s nothing.’

Maddie told her it was ethically, politically and medically unacceptable, and Bec was obliged to take a different route, to create a vaccine out of parasites that had been carefully killed. It was this, six years later, her group was testing in Africa. It half-worked, but then so did many things.

Bec had met Val after the newspaper he edited interviewed her about her malaria work. She was flattered by the article the reporter wrote about her and her group; the journalist got it more or less right, even if he exaggerated what they might achieve and the number of lives they might save. She liked herself in the photo they took. The smiling Bec in the picture seemed like a smarter, prettier twin, the one Bec could never be as good as but who’d do her best to help her sister along.

She bought the paper edition and as she turned its pages, looking for the story, she skimmed the other articles. They made her feel she was in a room full of bitter, frightened people who reckoned the world had been going to hell for ever and it was somebody else’s fault.

When she got an invitation to Val’s Best of Britain party she went along. She liked parties; they were like little lives. And when Val asked her there if they could have dinner, the contrast between his nervousness towards her and the nervousness his journalists felt towards him made her skin tingle. Saying yes seemed to be another woman’s risk, like something the Bec in the picture would do, and not regret. It’d been easy for her to start seeing him and sleeping with him without thinking it would turn permanent, imagining that it could be rewound in some mutually painless backward version of the way they’d got together.

Val took her to grand places – a hotel on an island on a
lake in Italy, with rose petals floating in the stone bath set in the floor of their rooms; a country house in Scotland, owned by a lord Val was friends with; the British Museum after hours, when some gazillionaire hired it for a ball and decked it out with gold and red silk organza. She liked lifting her hand out of the bath and seeing it covered with soft scarlet petals; the gold and red made her open her mouth in wonder; and the lord’s house was full of touchable, gnarly artefacts made of walnut, oak and brass. But she never met the tycoon, didn’t like the lord and was made uneasy by the rich guests at the island hotel, who seemed sad that they couldn’t meter the goodness of the time they were having, to the decimal point of a smile. Val arranged these displays for her too close together, one showy weekend after another. She felt hurried through a process. When friends used words like ‘glamorous’ and ‘romantic’ to describe the experiences Val contrived for her, she resented him.

Since she’d begun going out with Val she’d found herself dressing up more, as she’d played in childhood, posing in her father’s beret or an old miniskirt of her mother’s. When she turned herself out one morning at the lord’s house in green wellies, a white Aran sweater, a tweed skirt, a waxed green jacket with corduroy collar and a small string of fake pearls, her hosts hadn’t looked surprised, and didn’t laugh at her, even though the lord’s niece was dressed almost identically, except that her pearls hadn’t, presumably, cost £9.99 from a chain.

Bec wished that Val had complimented her on the success of her disguise instead of telling her she looked wonderful. At a garden party Bec thought she’d gone too far with elbow gloves, a broad-brimmed hat, a gauzy shawl looped round her
waist and forearms and a ridiculous little satin-effect clutch. The extreme whiteness of her dress, the pleats, the A-line! But Val, and the other guests, had told her she looked, whatever it had been, one of those words, and she hadn’t been the only woman with garden-party gauntlets on. And Val was good at it, too, exactly the part in a white linen suit. He dressed in the perfect imitation of an imaginary past archetype. Once, delighted by his mimicry of a wealthy middle-aged American being smart-casual in London – the dark blue blazer, the light blue shirt, the khaki slacks, the loafers – she’d told him that she liked his costume, and he hadn’t seemed to understand. ‘What costume?’ he said.

After she’d taken his ring, she remembered him looking her up and down before an elaborate dinner and saying ‘Celia would be proud.’ She wondered now whether he’d been looking not so much to replace his wife by marrying Bec as to pay the dead woman tribute. How strange, Bec thought, that she and Val could have been moving in such different directions, so close together; that she’d enjoyed his company as a rolling holiday from the lab, and liked the feeling she was helping him recover from Celia’s death, while he’d been pursuing a suitable acquisition, someone who looked fresh in a party frock, came with a sort of patriotic stamp inherited from her father and seemed to be doing good in the world.

She really had not been paying attention. He wasn’t a churchgoer but she’d never known what kind of conversations he’d been having with God when, each night, he knelt by the bed, clasped his hands together, touched his forehead to the knuckle of his thumb, and was silent for a minute or two. She’d asked him. ‘Just praying,’ he said. It never seemed to hold him back when he got into bed with her.

The death of her father, when she was nine, and the death of the love of Joel, when she was twenty-six, were still present to her now at thirty-three in the alterations they’d made to the fabric of her peace of mind. She’d got used to the monumental remains of those disasters looming up in her moodscape. They overshadowed her and she didn’t understand how the people she had dealings with didn’t seem likewise overshadowed by the ridges and craters of their own encounters with fate. She wasn’t the only one to have known the early death of a parent or the death of love, and she couldn’t work out whether other people had come up with a system for rationalising catastrophe that she wasn’t being let in on, or whether they’d learned how to fool themselves into thinking there would be no more catastrophes.

She was on the hunt for secret systems. Her behaviour outside science seemed quite random to her and she hoped that in her randomness she might stumble across some pattern that others had concocted to show them how to behave. It left her vulnerable to confident men, although she found that the moment their plans and their confidence fell apart was when she liked them most.

The post-docs would invite her to parties and she’d often drift straight from the lab late at night into the music and drunken talk of somebody’s living room. One morning not long after her thirtieth birthday she got up from the bed where she’d spent the night with a man she’d just met. Karl, or it could have been Carl, she never found out, had a desk under the window in his room. Bec found her shirt on the desk, crumpled and inside out, covering a pile of folders and books. When she picked up the shirt she saw there was a sheet of paper at the top of the pile partly covered with
grid-like doodles, a column of figures and a list of girls’ names. Bec counted. There were twenty-five names. Bec turned and asked C/Karl if this was all the women he’d gone out with.

‘All the girls I’ve slept with,’ said C/Karl. ‘Since I left university.’

‘Are you going to add my name?’

C/Karl smiled, propped himself up on one elbow, and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. ‘I was bored. I wondered how many.’

‘But why did you write the names down like that?’

‘Don’t you ever do it?’ said C/Karl, as if this were an answer.

‘No,’ said Bec, sitting down on the edge of the bed with her back to him, pulling the sleeves out of the shirt. ‘What do these symbols mean?’

C/Karl wriggled over and looked with reluctance at the sheet. ‘Which ones?’ he said.

‘Here, where there’s a lightning flash.’

‘Those are the crazy ones.’

‘There are a lot of those.’

Now that his system had been exposed he was excited to be explaining it. ‘A star means they’re good-looking, an M means marriage material, and the F means the sex was amazing. The smiley face is them being fun to be with.’

‘What about the pound sign? That means they’ve got money? That’s the one that embarrasses you, isn’t it? Why?’

C/Karl shrugged, smiled, scratched his thigh and searched for the makings of a smoke.

‘Did you propose to any of the marriageable ones?’

C/Karl shook his head, shook the match out and wrinkled
his eyes against the white strands curling up from the cigarette.

‘Too young to settle down.’

Bec frowned. ‘What about this one?’ she said. ‘Dora. Star star star, M, F F F, smiley face, pound sign. She sounds too good to let her get away. Were you in love with her?’

C/Karl laughed a soft, hoarse laugh. ‘Lightning flash, lightning flash, lightning flash …’

‘Do you have a target? Are you competing with your friends?’

‘No questions before breakfast,’ said C/Karl, holding her shoulders from behind. His hands slipped over her breasts and she reached up and fondled his shaven head, warm like some just-baked thing. She plucked the cigarette from his mouth and took a drag.

‘I have to go,’ said Bec.

‘Do you really not know how many men you’ve slept with?’

Bec looked at him, breathed out a cloud and said she’d been with three men already that week.

C/Karl snatched his hands off her as if contact would burn them and moved crabwise back in the bedclothes. His eyes became remote and tough. She couldn’t tell, when he clasped his hands over his knees, looked down and shook his head with something like a laugh, if he was disapproving or envious or just surprised.

She told a friend. ‘Four in one week is quite a lot,’ said the friend. ‘I never had four in one week. I never had two in one week.’

‘That was the only time,’ said Bec. ‘I was feeling unvalued. But still, who says it’s a lot?’

The friend wriggled. ‘It sort of kills the idea there’s any intimacy there.’