Life (17 page)

The symposium had been on a Saturday. Nirmal kept her waiting for a week before he called her to his office. No one else mentioned the symposium except Ron Butler (m), who made an attempt to congratulate her on breaking her duck. Anna thought the delay was a refinement of cruelty; she realized later that Nirmal had been giving himself a chance to calm down. The worst part was that Anna hadn’t an idea what she had done wrong. He’d accepted her Transferred Y outline without comment, merely telling her to carry on, and she’d been too unsure to ask to talk it over. She’d handed him a copy of her final draft and waited hopefully for his input. She’d been disappointed when he failed to make any response, but it was typical of Nirmal. The best and worst thing about the interview itself was that everything became very clear very quickly.

“So, Miss Senoz. I gather that the work we have been doing together has been far from worthy of your undivided attention. When I suggested that you give a paper at the Young Scientists’ symposium, I think I had a right to assume that your presentation would focus on the doctoral project you are undertaking with my supervision.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“But no. Your mind is elsewhere.” He lifted a copy of Anna’s Transferred Y paper and slapped it down on his desk as if he hoped to break all its bones. “If it cannot be distorted into the service of your much more interesting private preoccupations, your work in this lab does not engage you at all. I trusted you implicitly! It was extremely, extremely unpleasant for me to discover, in public, that you had chosen to present a peculiar hobbyhorse of your own—”

Anna was dumbfounded. It dawned on her that Nirmal had not read her outline or her paper. Of course, he’d assumed he
had
read it. He knew everything she’d been doing on the pseudogenes. He’d assumed she would be going over that ground. He had not made time to check up on her, or it had slipped his mind, or he’d let it go because he hated one-on-one meetings. She stared at her hands, clasped in her lap to stop them shaking, and wondered, how on earth did someone as allergic to personal contact as Nirmal get to be a postgraduate adviser? It wasn’t because she was a girl; he was as distant with the male members of the team. Everybody complained about it.

That’s science for you. The better you are at what you do, the more time you’re doomed to spend doing things you’re no good at. Her terror was strangely dissipated.
No way
was she going to remind him that he’d told her she could do what she liked.
No way
was she going to point out that he’d had every opportunity to find out and had omitted to make sure he knew what his student was going to say in her first public appearance.

“Until you are free to return to your beloved potatoes,” Nirmal was saying, with withering politeness. “I expect you to concentrate
mainly
on the tasks in hand here.”

Anna nodded: accepting her lessons. Anything you say in the lab, your supervisor is going to hear. Anything you do, it is your responsibility to make sure your supervisor knows about it. Don’t take chances with the natural human vanity of your boss.

“Professor Reeves intends to publish a transcript of the colloquium. Needless to say,
this
will not feature. It will never be published. I cannot consider putting my name to it.”

She nodded again. She was no longer devastated. She knew he would not be unfair in his personal record. Neither of them would say it, but he knew he’d been neglectful.

“I’m sorry,” she said, standing up. “I got carried away. It won’t happen again.”

“Good. I hope I can trust you from now on.”

She reached for the paper. Nirmal’s thin hand came down upon it, the nails almond shaped and calcined, thick as seashells. He didn’t speak, so she headed for the door.

“Oh, Anna—”

She quailed. What now?

“This is very good work,” said her supervisor dryly, tapping the Transferred Y paper. “Wrong-headed, even absurd, in the implications, which you wisely didn’t spell out. But bold, original, well-reasoned, and well-presented. Your technical work is also very good. You have a formidable talent, young lady. But you must focus. Focus!”

“Thank you,” she muttered. “Thank you, I’m sorry, I will.”

“A formidable talent,” repeated Nirmal. “Don’t waste it!”

That summer Anna spent several months helping to install a Parentis clinic in a city in West Africa. It was the first time she’d been abroad, apart from Greece with Daz. In Africa most people who couldn’t have children were infertile for obvious reasons: AIDS-related problems, uterine scarring from other sexually transmitted disease, sperm and egg cells deformed by parental poverty or exposure to heavy agricultural chemicals, non-sexually transmitted infectious diseases, parasites that took their toll of the reproductive system, FGM side-effects. Identifying sex chromosomal problems would not be a high priority. But it was crucial for Parentis’s deal with the government that this clinic should provide the full service. Anna helped to see the sequencing lab set up and trained the local technicians. After the first month she traveled a lot, usually alone. She spent her time showing paramedics in corrugated iron shacks how to avoid contamination when taking DNA samples from pregnant women and how to store them by a new method that didn’t involve refrigeration. She brought the samples back to the city and helped to prove that the refrigeration-free storage was effective, by preparing, cloning, and sequencing the DNA.

You didn’t have to be an eco-terrorist to see that the whole thing was nonsense, as far as the health and future of the African countrywomen and their children were concerned. The more-money-than-sense gene is everywhere. But the work was interesting, and you met some nice people. You could pack a lot of human warmth into two or three village days. And in spite of everything, the sensation of being at the forefront was fun. Of course Africans should spend their tax money on sensible things. But whoever heard of a government in the so-called developed world that did that?

When she returned to Leeds there was a message on her email from [email protected], inviting her to a weekend party, a college reunion (Wol’s words), loosely intended to celebrate the Millennium, plus his and Rosey’s January birthdays. The same evening Rosey MacCarthy rang her and insisted that she sign up. Anna had had practically no contact with
they all
since finals, but she said yes. She was afraid she was bound to regret this. But she was feeling different after Africa, and that interview with Nirmal had left a slow burn of warmth (a formidable talent…). She thought she could bear to meet her friends again.

The SDF team now had a transgenic female-to-male mouse (only one so far) with testes that produced sperm. There was something wrong: s/he still wasn’t fertile. But the pace was heating up. Everyone was anxiously shadowing the work of the Melbourne team, their closest rivals. The team leader Down Under was a man called Pat Mc Creevy, an old sparring partner (or professional enemy) of Nirmal’s, which made the race edgy… A new postdoc had come to Leeds Parentis, a young woman called Meg Methal, who was a union activist. She told Nirmal that Anna could make better money for shorter hours doing piecework in a clothing sweatshop and that he ought to get Parentis to pay her a fat royalty for the work she’d done on speeding up the machines. Nirmal considered these jokes in poor taste.

“You shouldn’t let them brainwash you,” insisted Meg, as she and Anna worked side by side. “I know how it works and
it’s all one way.
Old Nirmal expects total loyalty from you, you won’t get any bloody thing back from him, and I’m not being sexist. I’ve had women bosses, they’re just the same—”

Anna let the chatter wash over her. She had been looking at DNA samples from the Cameroon pregnancy clinic. Just out of curiosity, she had decided to find out how they would react to her Transferred Y sequence probes.

It was there.

Impossible as it might seem, this young Cameroonian woman and her female fetus, chosen at random, seemed to have the Transferred Y chunk of bases, harmlessly inserted into a non-coding sequence on one of their X chromosomes. The hair on the back of Anna’s neck prickled and tried to stand. What could it possibly mean?

“You say something?”

“Nothing, just muttering to myself.”

Defy Nirmal? Demand more money and better working conditions? No thank you! Meg Methal was right, no doubt, but following her banner would be far more costly to Anna’s career than the dominion of an autocratic boss. Besides, since the day he gave her back her honor, Anna had begun to feel for KM Nirmal exactly the loyalty that the feudal society of lab science demanded. She was a samurai, she must serve some lord or other. When SDF was in a less intense phase, she would talk to Nirmal again about Transferred Y. She knew he would listen. Until then, she bowed to his will.

Andantino

i

Wol and Rosey’s birthday-Millennium-house party was held on Beevey Island in the Thames Estuary, in a Victorian gothic pile called Carstairs Lodge, which sat among the reed beds like an uprooted public library set down on an alien planet. The island was a bird sanctuary; when the Lodge wasn’t being rented no one lived there except the warden. It was the second week of January, and the weather was not propitious. When Spence arrived, on the Saturday morning, rain was lashing the estuary, and there was half a gale blowing. Wol had come over in the birdman’s launch to fetch him—along with Yesha Craven, Simon’s girlfriend, who’d also been unable to make it for Friday evening. The shore party returned at an awkward juncture. Persons unknown had made a private midnight feast out of birthday delicacies, and Rosey had just discovered the depredations: missing bottles of Veuve Cliquot, nothing left of the paté de foíe that was meant to go with the braised quail, the frozen soft fruit for Wol’s famous pavlova vanished. There was no sign of Anna Senoz in the old fashioned kitchen. Spence scanned the faces, wondering if it were possible he didn’t recognize her.

“Fucking outrageous!” yelled Rosey. “What kind of friends did I invite—”

Nobody was owning up. Those trying to get their breakfast moved about with cowed heads and lowered eyes, while Rosey turned her wrath on poor Wol, who would just have to go back over the river and go shopping—

“Look, Rosey,” countered Yesha, bravely. “It isn’t so bad. We’ll survive—”

“That’s not the point! The point is the disgusting, anti-social, intolerable—”

“I don’t think I can get the man to take the launch out again,” pleaded Wol. The island could be reached by car at low tide, but that wasn’t any use at the moment.

Anna, with Simon Gough, walked in on this scene, dripping hard.

Spence received her arrival like a shot of liquor, like an infusion of warmth in his soul. Her nose was red. One black, soaked curl streaked her right cheek. He was both glad and sorry to note that she was wearing pants. He hoped she was the same Anna, knew he was a different Spence. If he’d timed things better he might have copped a hello how are you hug. Too late now.

“Hi Spence,” said Simon, “Dig the dreads.”

Anna smiled. “Hi, Spence.”

She and Simon and Yesha exchanged glances and retreated together into the hall. And that would be the pattern, Spence realized, of this weekend that was already half over. Confusion: social blur with people he didn’t know any more, no chance of making contact with the only person who mattered.

Simon and Anna had been early risers. In this gathering of smart, Bohemian young Londoners, a northern-nerds-in-suits camaraderie united them—though Simon had given up
his
doctorate and was now rich, working as a systems analyst for a power company. They had set out into the wind and rain, nerdishly determined to see the sea, since they were at the seaside, but had been driven back. In these conditions Beevey Island was no beauty spot. There was nothing out there but a waste of shingle, reeds, and brambles.

“I’m fucking glad it wasn’t me got at the champagne,” said Simon. Tall Yesha squeezed her palms across his rain-silvered head, shaking rivulets from her fingers. Anna remembered her from third year, when she’d been living in the house where Simon had his strange glass studio. She was from Birmingham; she’d been doing Media Studies. Now, according to Simon, she was into Modern Dance. She was immensely thin, muscular, and chic: almost as scary-looking as the Londoners. But her smile was full of unassuming friendliness.

“Fuck, yes. I’m terrified of Rosey.”

“What about our Spence with dreadlocks,” said Simon. “Hey, d’you think it’s true about him being gay? Ramone says it’s definite.”

“What?” said Anna. The rabid one had arrived at the river pier in a very fancy gun-metal Porsche, with Daz and Tex, Daz’s comic-book-artist boyfriend; a monkey on a lead and a parrot in a cage. She seemed to be in an angry phase: she was ignoring Anna. “How would Ramone know that?”

“Well, he’s been living in Morocco. Didn’t you know? Been getting the occasional email from him, from the weirdest places. You don’t go to Tangier to pull birds, do you?”

Spence came out of the kitchen. “We need to dry off,” said Yesha, hugging Simon. “Catch you later, Spence. Nice to meet yer.” The couple hurried away upstairs.

The stained glass in the stairwell caught a fugitive ray of sunlight. Clear amber, from robes of an allegorical figure called Harvest, gleamed in Anna’s eyes.

“Hey, Anna. I’m ridiculously pleased to see you.”

She nodded. “You too. I mean me too. I’m all wet. I’d better go and change.”

Saturday night was riotous, the banquet so splendid even Rosey forgot her losses. Anna slept well, eventually. When she woke it was bright daylight. She lay listening to the shouting of the gulls outside her window and thought she was in Regis Passage again. So Spence was gay now. Simon’s cheery deduction seemed like settled fact, like something she had always known. Oh well. Thank God she’d found out before she made any dumb moves. It was still good to see him again: good to see
they all,
in spite of the whacking price tag… Rosey and Wol had always been expensive company. Veuve Cliquot, my God: and she would have to pay her way. Couldn’t bear not to.

She went down to the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea. No one else was stirring. The Common Room, a huge cavern next to the kitchen, was strewn with remnants of the night’s revels: a grey funereal mound in the log-burning fireplace; glasses, smeared plates on the long table; overflowing ashtrays. By the double-glazed French doors that overlooked the estuary stood a battered grand piano, open. Someone had been playing Gilbert and Sullivan.

Anna had gone to bed at four, after dazedly helping Wol to finish the crossword in a copy of the
Telegraph
that they’d found in the log basket. She remembered strains of the chorus of the peers from
Iolanthe,
rising to her attic. She tried the keys: looked inside the piano stool and discovered an album of easy classical pieces. As she started to play, carefully and slowly, someone opened the door of the room. Presumably the person retreated, because Anna felt nothing but quiet behind her. She finished her piece, turned, and stretched: and Spence was there, curled sideways in an armchair, watching her. He smiled. She started to play again, remembering Spence’s inimitable laziness—

“How’s Cesf?”

“He’s okay, I guess. I’ve been away you know, but Mom sends me bulletins. He’s slowing down a tad. Getting kind of elderly.” Spence’s voice took a downward turn; it was a sore point. Why can’t pets live forever?

“We’re none of us getting any younger.”

He laughed, as she had meant him to. The mean age of the Carstairs party was around twenty-three and a quarter. For the second time she reached the repeat of the phrase, so obvious and yet so tender, that led to the final resolution. There. Not good, but better.

“What’s that called? It’s lovely.”

“It’s by Mozart. Andantino, K236. I did it for a grade exam.”

“I never knew you could play the piano.”

“I can’t, not really. I had lessons for years, but I haven’t practiced in ages.”

“Play it again?”

“Okay.”

It was hard to believe that he had not seen her since they’d kissed goodbye, the night before she left for Greece with Daz. He had known that he still desired her, in theory. He had not known that he’d feel like this: that his breathing would slow and his mind grow quiet, simply because she was there. He felt like the Manchurian Candidate, as if someone had spoken the magic word and plunged him into a hypnotic trance. But what could he do? Not a thing, probably.

“What did you do for the actual Millennium?”

Anna shrugged. “Nothing much.”

She had seen the new era in with Graham and Roz and Shannon and their friends. They’d gone out to cheer the municipal fireworks and returned to watch some of the wave of tv excitement passing round the world.

“Me neither. Did you think it was important?”

“Well, yes I did,” said Anna, still playing. “For about a minute and a half. I thought maybe the heavens would open and God would say, come on you lot, time’s up. But then I got over it.”

He laughed. She remembered it had been easy to make him laugh—

“Did you enjoy yourself last night?”

“I suppose.”

“I was proud of you, the way you tackled those charades.”

“Oh, I was drunk,” she said. “I don’t remember much about it.”

The music finished. Spence sat up. “It’s not raining. I was thinking of taking a walk, to freshen my hangover. D’you want to come along?” At that moment, malignly on cue, in walked Ramone, with Tex the fake cowboy in tow.

“Hi there,” said Ramone. After one mean glance she turned her back on Spence. “I’m glad you’re not doing anything, Anna ’cos Tex wants to draw you. It won’t take long.”

“Got my sketch pad right here,” drawled the cowboy, holding up an A4 cartridge pad. “Anyone have a pencil? Piece of charcoal from the fire would do fine.” His little blue eyes roved insolently over Anna. “I can take her right here.”

Spence had been wondering what he was supposed to do about the guy with the fake accent. Was it a joke? Was “Tex” on the run from the law? His amusement flipped, in an instant, into hatred. He stood up, feeling an urge to punch Ramone’s hired gun in his smug, blond, stubbly, undercut jaw—

“Stay where you are, Anna,” ordered Ramone. “Tex can have Spence’s chair. Did you say you were going for a walk, Spence? I’ll come with you.”

Ramone and Spence walked out into the chill and fair morning. A track of packed shingle ran round the island, crossing the Carstairs Lodge approach. They followed this, the breeze in their faces. “It’s turning out nice,” said Ramone, with a baleful sideways grin. “This place used to be used to fatten up cattle, that’s why it’s called Beevey Island. Can’t imagine it, can you? Are you pissed off with me? I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”

She
looked
far more different than Anna. She had a prison crop with scarlet stencils, tight black jeans and a celtic knot tattoo around her throat. But coming back to old friends is like watching trees grow: she was still Mr Toad in petticoats, his bad fairy.

“Why, gee no, Ramone. Interrupting what? What could have given you that idea?”