In the hours that followed her opening of the DNA results, Talissa felt as if she was caught in a room on fire where every exit turned out to be blocked.
There had been a mistake … There had been a crime … The weight of it was more than she could bear. She needed to confide. In Susan. In Mark LaSalle. Even in poor Felix. She’d been told by Susan, who’d heard from Leon, that Felix was in and out of some mental health facility. For the first time, she regretted not having a man who shared her life at home; the closeness of a lovers’ bond would have covered such a secret, kept it safe.
She walked up and down the stripped floorboards of her apartment, reeling from one wall to another, like the lioness in the Bronx Zoo.
Or Kavya Gopal. Yes, Kavya would be good. But she was on the other side of the world. Or her mother. She’d have a long perspective; she was old enough to be selfish and therefore calm. But no: she was also becoming forgetful and might not understand.
The problem was the discovery was so large that once she shared it, once it was out in the world, it could never be reined in. Then she began to consider what it might mean for Mary and Alaric. Who was going to tell them? She pictured the look of disbelief on Mary’s face and the dumb agony on Alaric’s. They didn’t have the capacity to take in such news. Finally, she thought of Seth himself. Bouncing the ball on his foot, sensing the presence of the cat in the bushes, scared of girls, eating his burgers, barely smiling, making his way through school like all the others. Word of this must never reach his classmates. In high school she’d been teased for an entire year for having the wrong shoes.
In the middle of the night, and not before, it came to her that she should contact the Parn Institute in London. She went into the living room and looked at her screen. The lavish home page unfurled. ‘Our People’. Catrina Olsen was still there, with the same mugshot. Malik Wood remained the director, now a little grey above the ears. If there had been some bizarre mistake, these people ought to be told about it. Maybe they already knew, but had decided to keep it quiet. They’d sure done enough blood tests.
Perhaps the first thing to do was to check the result, make sure it was neither a blip in the machinery nor a practical joke of some kind. If she asked Mark LaSalle for another test, he might become suspicious; on the other hand, she could scarcely send the hair sample elsewhere and expect the degree of confidentiality that she’d had from an academic lab.
At six in the morning, she remembered reading a book by a Swedish palaeoanthropologist whose main concern in extracting DNA from ancient bones had been how easily they became contaminated: by bacteria, by the DNA of other species who had shared their resting place or by their modern-human handlers. In Leipzig, they’d constructed sterile rooms where many retests had been run by postdocs in full protective gear before they’d got results they could rely on. A Nobel Prize had followed. Talissa crafted a modest message to Mark LaSalle that gave no suggestion the results had been surprising but in which she chastised herself for being careless in the presentation of the sample. The lock of hair had been left lying around. Who knew, perhaps Pelham had even sneezed on it. She couldn’t live with her better scientific self without a confirmation of the result. Therefore she was going to bring a second sample, one which had been more rigorously looked after.
Knowing Mark a little, she added a PS about coffee or a drink to thank him for his time.
So, ten days later, she found herself in a real old-fashioned steakhouse on Lexington and 47th, Mark LaSalle’s choice of rendezvous.
Mark’s reputation was that of what the head of department, Debra Hillenbrand, called ‘a second bassoon’. He was not the brightest on the team, but he got the work done. Talissa had worked with him on some finds in Idaho and they had both done research into Homo vannesiensis, as well as teaching undergraduates. He was eight years younger than Talissa, and had done his first degree at Northwestern, his family being long-time Chicago people, descended, so he said, from French trappers.
Professor Hillenbrand was ambivalent about Mark. ‘He’s nice to look at,’ she said. ‘He’s the kind of guy who when I was starting out was a menace to have around. Too keen on the opposite sex. Or as we called it then, “misogynist”. That word stopped them in their tracks.’
With the professor’s caution in her ears, Talissa had kept a distance between herself and Mark, though his regular looks were not of a kind that appealed to her in any case. If a man were not actually beautiful, like Felix, she preferred him plain but dynamic, like Aron Landor.
‘I ordered a martini for you,’ said Mark, as she sat down. ‘I hope that’s OK.’
‘Sure thing.’
‘Straight up. With a twist.’
‘How did you know?’ She seldom drank martinis, but she was in Mark’s debt and wanted to join in.
‘No sensible person wants ice cubes to displace the liquor. The twist was a guess.’
‘And I’m a sensible person?’
‘Maybe not. But you’re a clever one.’
‘Right.’
Talissa did some fussing in her purse. The evening seemed to be going at a hundred miles an hour already. She was glad she had opted for a simple dress and scant make-up.
‘So,’ she said. ‘Thanks again for your help with the DNA thing.’
‘Did you get the second result OK?’
‘Sure, I got the code last night and opened it up. It was exactly the same as the first result.’
‘So. No contamination.’
‘Yup. All good and regular.’
‘So, was this a little side hustle of yours?’
‘Yes. Nothing to do with our programme. It was just a favour for a friend.’
‘You know that public labs are not allowed to test for species percentages,’ said Mark. ‘Only a few academic labs like ours can do that.’
‘I do. I remember the fuss when the law was passed. I never quite understood why they had to be so fierce about it.’
‘It was hard enough to get the health care system to fund DNA testing at all. They had to fight to prove that knowing someone was likely to develop heart disease or breast cancer was a money saver in the long run. Early prevention.’
‘Of course, but why couldn’t the tests also show that you had some founder-American or Chinese or whatever in your ancestry?’
‘They just thought that information would be prejudicial. Could be harvested and used against people.’
Talissa shrugged. ‘Well, I guess it is kind of private.’
‘Yes,’ said Mark. ‘It also means so little. My grandma did a commercial spit test, when they first came out, and discovered she was five per cent Ashkenazi Jew. She thought that changed who she was! My dad had to explain to her very slowly that there was not a gene for “Jewishness”. It was just that at some point, many hundreds of years back, a couple of her ancestors had stayed in the same place for a long time and bred within a restricted population, accounting for a minute and insignificant genetic change. That was all that was caught by the test.’
‘And what did Grandma make of that?’
‘Dad told her she was too old for a bat mitzvah now. So. I ordered some clams on the half shell to start with. Then I thought I’d have the rib-eye. What about you?’
‘Oh wow. I think I’ll just get the baked eggplant.’
‘You don’t eat meat?’
‘Not much.’
‘You should have said.’
‘No, I shouldn’t. This is my treat to say thank you. Would you like wine with it?’
While their food was on its way, Talissa listened to Mark talk about his family back in Illinois and thought about Seth. She had forgotten the federal law on DNA testing. It meant that if Seth were tested in America, he would find out nothing about his ancestry. She would need to check that a similar restriction applied in England.
In addition to the littleneck clams, the waiter brought some oysters and some cold Chardonnay. With the steak, they drank a red wine that tasted like plum jam and Mark persuaded Talissa to try a corner of his giant rib-eye. How much Seth would have liked it, she thought, with the side orders of cornbread and French fries, dusted with thyme and served in a metal cone.
‘Look at this! I feel like we’re back in another century,’ said Talissa.
‘Are you OK with that? I think it’s, like, their specialty here. To make you feel like Jack Nicholson might walk in with Michelle Pfeiffer on his arm.’
‘Hope Michelle was a carnivore,’ said Talissa. ‘But, yeah, I like it.’ The wine had made her feel benevolent.
‘So how’s your home life?’ said Mark. ‘If I’m allowed to ask?’
‘It’s great, thanks for asking. Just me and Pelham at the moment. We like it that way.’
‘Pelham? Is he … an anthropologist too?’
‘No. He’s a dog.’
‘Oh. I thought he—’
‘But a very handsome one. Like a greyhound, but smaller. With long whiskers and big brown eyes. A beautiful blue-grey coat. He kind of talks to me. He’s playful, runs like the wind, but likes the sofa best. He’s very devoted.’
‘I bet. And were you … If I can ask. Were you ever married?’
‘Pelham and me? I wish.’
‘No, I mean—’
‘Not yet.’ Talissa smiled. ‘You?’
‘Me? No, no. Not at all.’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Oh, nothing. Just that, well, people notice that you’re … God, I don’t know how to put this without losing my job.’
‘Poor Mark. Life in the femisphere.’
‘Personable? Is that an OK word?’
‘I think so,’ said Talissa. It was presumably what Aron Landor had had in mind when he whispered in her ear, though it was not exactly the term he’d used. She felt a tug of nostalgia for the smell of sweat and cement dust.
‘What a relief,’ said Mark. ‘Thanks, Dr Adam.’
‘I’ll make a note of it on your next appraisal.’
Despite herself, she felt a small erotic charge at the thought of admonishing Mark while he stared at the floor. He drained his glass and put it down in a hopeful way. Talissa was ready to leave, but felt it might be rude. More wine came, and Mark LaSalle got down to business, telling her about his life’s disappointments and the way he felt misjudged. What is it about me, Talissa thought, that makes people feel they can confide? Susan used to tease her that she had a distant manner that she’d cultivated to keep people, men especially, at bay. But that wasn’t at all what happened. Mary and Alaric had trusted her from the moment they let her into their flat. Kavya Gopal had told her about her deepest feelings for her children within an hour of her arrival.
‘… only three long-time girlfriends,’ Mark was saying. ‘I really don’t think that’s extreme. By any metric.’
‘Sure thing.’
‘But it’s a minefield, you know.’
‘I thought any straight guy in the city could have his pick of—’
‘Not any more. And in any case, I’m not any straight guy. I’m a romantic.’
‘Of course you are.’
‘Seriously, Talissa. I mean, maybe once back in caveman days, guys could just sleep around and it was all good. But I honestly don’t think it’s been like that in this century.’
Starting to be tired by the dating conversation, Talissa pushed him into childhood and his family. Unlike her, he had brothers and sisters. They’d moved out of the South Side to Evanston and had a big family life with Thanksgivings and graduations, unsuitable boyfriends and family quarrels … She had ceased to take it in; but Mark was a decent kind of guy, she felt, rather modest when you thought about it, and had perhaps been wrongly portrayed as a potential creep at work.
In the days that followed, her sense of panic receded far enough to allow her to formulate a plan. Humanity had a genocidal history of tearing itself to pieces over differences of appearance in its own kind. They had fought and killed for language, historic grudges, skin colour and other matters of no scientific significance in people of the self-same genotype. If her fellow humans could be this violent to their own people, how would they treat someone who was actually different? The record of what they had done to other species was discouraging: kill, eat, ‘domesticate’ or put in a zoo. That was about it.
The only thing to do now was to contact the Parn Institute in London. Her regular communication with them had stopped some years ago, but she could reopen it with an approach to the sympathetic Catrina Olsen. After all, it was Catrina who’d impregnated her. And together, they might shape a plan to protect the boy.