15

‘Hi, darling, let me put on my headphones,’ said Lucy. ‘“Stop radioactivity”,’ she chanted, ‘or, at least move it a little further from my brain.’

She was lying in a hammock on Hunter’s private terrace, watching a bumblebee crawl into a wisteria bell and clamber out encrusted in pollen. The other guests had gone, except for Saul, who was leaving later that day. She and Hunter would then have a few days alone; alone, that is, apart from the unavoidable Jade – she sometimes expected to find her in Hunter’s bed, with her radiant teeth, asking if there was anything she could do to help – and, of course, the Plein Soleil ‘team’, which numbered somewhere between ten and twenty, it was hard to tell, since each day new people greeted her from behind a rose bush or stood politely aside on the staircase, carrying fresh linen or bottles of mineral water.

‘So, how are you?’ she asked, when she had the phone far enough away from her to talk comfortably.

‘I’ve got some big news,’ said Olivia, ‘or, at least, some growing news.’

‘Oh my god, you are pregnant,’ said Lucy, who had already talked with Olivia over the weekend about her emphatically late period.

‘Yup.’

‘Wow,’ said Lucy, hedging between congratulations and com- passion.

‘We’re both a bit stunned.’

‘Are you still unsure what to do?’

‘It’s just that…’

‘Have the baby,’ said Lucy impulsively. She realised, as she said it, how much she was longing for a set of multiplying cells she could be wholeheartedly enthusiastic about, and how much her vote was driven by a wave of sadness about no longer being able to have a child herself, given her uncertain prognosis. ‘As long as I can be a godmother,’ she added. She was going to have to compromise, given that she wasn’t going to be a mother or, for that matter, a god. She watched another bumblebee launch itself, weighted with cargo, into the air. It seemed to be her own atmosphere she was trying to lighten, as much as Olivia’s.

‘Obviously you’d be the godmother,’ said Olivia.

‘Francis is great, you’re great…’ Lucy felt herself getting lost in a complex, hollow mixture of regret and relief. Three years back, Nathan had talked fervently about having a child, wanting to tie down their relationship with the steel cables of parenthood. She had prevaricated, perhaps already knowing that she didn’t ultimately want to stay with him.

‘Francis is great,’ said Olivia, ‘but we haven’t been together for that long, and he doesn’t make a fortune counting nightingales and living in a tied cottage. Nor do I. And I’m attached to my independence – or at least used to it. Attached to being non-attached; it feels like there could be a problem lurking there.’

Lucy didn’t answer immediately. She was thinking about how divided she had always been about having a baby: wanting to give it what she hadn’t had, while fearing she would pass on the worst of what she did have. Recently, she had been thinking more and more about the stresses of her childhood in relation to her illness. It was one of the penalties of her holistic approach, not to allocate blame, but to wonder about the psychosomatic chain, if there was one.

‘Is the adoption thing coming up for you?’ she asked. ‘I mean, Karen didn’t want to have a child when she was pregnant with you.’

‘Sure,’ said Olivia, ‘but I didn’t meet her until I was twenty-six, so she doesn’t play a huge part in my thinking.’

‘Hmm,’ said Lucy, agreeing in a way that implied that it couldn’t be quite so simple, but hurrying on to a more affirmative note. ‘I can so easily picture Francis walking around Howorth with a baby strapped to his chest.’

‘So can I,’ said Olivia.

‘And also,’ said Lucy, in a more practical tone, ‘Hunter has become wild about wilding and is planning to give Francis all sorts of gigs, including wilding his ranch in California, which is huge compared to this place.’

‘I know, that’s exciting,’ said Olivia, ‘and Francis is already halfway through his report on Plein Soleil, but we can’t rely entirely on Hunter to pay for the costs of bringing up a child.’

There was a sharp edge to Olivia’s tone that made Lucy feel that she was more of a charity case than she would have liked. She was running EpiFutures, but she was also following her doctor’s instructions not to push herself too hard. In her experience, what ‘too hard’ meant in the corporate world was the point at which insanity became counterproductive. At Strategy, there had been a semi-satirical competitiveness about late hours and work-annihilated weekends from which she knew she was now exempt but also knew that she was now excluded.

‘That’s another thing that worries us about having a baby,’ Olivia went on, ‘there are seven billion of us already de-wilding the planet.’

‘True,’ said Lucy, ‘but there’s a drastic shortage of sane human beings, and you and Francis would definitely provide the world with one of those. How does he feel, other than co-stunned?’

‘Open,’ said Olivia. ‘Hang on, here he is, I’ll ask him.’

Lucy could make out some muffled response from Francis. She took the opportunity to swallow the medicinal mushrooms she had ready on the ledge beside the hammock: chaga, maitake, lion’s mane, reishi, coriolus.

‘He says he’s apprehensively excited by the pregnancy,’ said Olivia, ‘but stoically resigned to ending it, if that’s my decision.’

‘In other words, he’s being perfect as usual,’ said Lucy.

‘Perhaps too perfect,’ said Olivia, ‘I think he may be a cyborg.’

‘You could be the mother of the first cyborg-sapiens child,’ said an awestruck Lucy, ‘and the child shall be called The Chosen One.’

‘That’s made me feel much better about my decision. There’s nothing like starting a new race and a world religion to take the pressure off,’ said Olivia. ‘Hang on, Francis is trying to give me a long list of his all too human failings.’

‘A classic cyborg move,’ said Lucy.

‘Absolutely classic,’ said Olivia. ‘I think I’m going to have to adjust his settings – switch off Human Camouflage to get my perfect companion back.’

‘For God’s sake hurry,’ said Lucy, ‘before Human Camouflage achieves a black box recursive learning autonomy, making it more human than any human being, until it ends up destroying us on the logical but unintended grounds of our sub-optimal humanity.’

‘That’s exactly what I was worried about,’ said Olivia.

‘I’d better leave you to deal with that emergency,’ said Lucy.

‘I’ll call tomorrow to check up on you,’ said Olivia. ‘I feel I’ve taken all the airtime today.’

‘Well, not quite,’ said Lucy, ‘and, anyway it’s a huge moment in the history of the species.’

‘Thanks for putting it in perspective,’ said Olivia, ‘it’s so easy to lose sight of the big picture.’

After they had said goodbye, Lucy switched her phone to silent. She wondered how helpful she had really been to Olivia. These playful riffs had always been a feature of their friendship, especially when there was something going on that was too charged to be worked out logically or conclusively. She saw now that the news of Olivia’s pregnancy had released an undertow of grief about the fact that she could no longer, in her own eyes, responsibly have a child. She had defended herself against that grief with a muddled fantasy about having a child with Nathan, as if the missed opportunity to be a single parent with a menacing diagnosis, bringing up a young child with a man who now hated her, were something to regret.

Apart from anything else, if she had a small child she might well not be lying in Hunter’s private hammock; although six months ago it was the last place she would have imagined herself being under any circumstances. When she had first met him, he had been far too charming to be lovable and when she started working for him, she often found him positively obnoxious. It was only over their dinner in November, on his second visit to London, when he had chosen to be open rather than impressive, that he became impressive for the first time. She could see that his manic lifestyle was scheduled by chronic loneliness and by the suspicion that any surrender to true feeling would act as Kryptonite to his superpowers. He was obviously attracted to her, but his relative authenticity was still too new for her to be able to trust him with her diagnosis. After that dinner she had thought about him more often, with a vague erotic curiosity, but she still chose to register her biopsy as ‘sick leave’. It was only when he turned up unexpectedly at Howorth that things changed more convincingly. His charm was replaced by kindness. His professional audacity turned out to be an extension of his emotional courage, rather than a substitute for it, as she had first suspected. He enveloped her in a protection that not only made her feel safe, but left her free to feel unsafe: when she was overcome by terror and despair (which she sometimes still was) he would meet her in whatever black site she had been abducted to by her fears.

In any case, she must try to do better next time she spoke to Olivia. For the moment, though, she wanted to rest and stare at the sea, albeit a little guiltily, and daydream for a while. First, she had to force down the remains of the Chinese herbs she was taking twice a day. She had prepared the bitter brew instead of breakfast, but Olivia’s call had interrupted her halfway through consuming it. In the World of Four Objects into which her diagnosis had marched her, like a bored prison guard pointing out the amenities of a cell – statistic, poison, scalpel, radiation – there was no room for Chinese herbs, or a low-sugar and low-carb diet that starved the tumour without starving the patient, or medicinal mushrooms, or enhanced mental health. There was ‘no evidence’ that any complementary approach worked because the presumption that it did not work prevented funding for the expensive, controlled, large sample, double-blind, replicable experiments that would constitute ‘evidence’. Nobody could be more grateful than Lucy that chemotherapy and surgery and radiation were available if her tumour became active enough to warrant their deployment, but she remained sceptical that there were no other actions to take, no other factors in play. How could her general fitness, the strength of her immune system, her will to live and her levels of stress make no difference? She wanted to create an environment that was as inimical to her cancer as possible and as favourable to the strength she would need in order to live with it. She hoped to add many years to the ‘long right-hand tail’ of the prognostic graph and felt that it was unscientific to assume that only blind luck and three types of aggression could carry her there.

While proper scientists defended true methodology by pouring boiling oil and dropping rocks on the besieging hordes of pseudoscientists, with their diets and their herbs, their acupuncture needles and their Ayurvedic spices, their meditation practices and yoga positions, it turned out that some parts of the citadel they were defending were rotten by their own ‘double blind’ standards. A ‘replication crisis’ was rippling through one discipline after another. Carl Sagan’s remark that extraordinary claims required extraordinary proofs, so often quoted by Bill Moorhead, didn’t mean that orthodox claims needed no proof at all, and yet many of those claims, which had taken on the complacency of unexamined assumptions, had recently been held up to the ordinary test of being replicable, and failed. The crisis itself had now been given the imprimatur of serious science by appearing in Nature and all other leading scientific journals. There was no need to storm the melting citadel; in fact, it aroused Lucy’s pity. She didn’t want to replace dogmatism with an equally obstinate iconoclasm, she just wanted those parts of the impressive stone walls that had been borrowed from the prop department to be sent back to the warehouse where they belonged with the other fake boulders and soft battlements; with the debris of broken theories, of phrenological busts and treatises on phlogiston, and giant pre-Copernican maps of the cosmos painted with lapis lazuli and gold.

‘Hi, baby,’ said Hunter, stepping on to the terrace, carrying two glasses. ‘Emile just made this juice for us. It’s got kale and beetroot and flax oil – I can’t remember all the ingredients, but it’s a super-food cluster-fuck that means we’re going to have to face up to our immortality.’

‘“The woods decay, the woods decay and fall … Me only cruel immortality consumes,”’ Lucy quoted wearily.

‘Hang on, I’m having one too. This is an immortality pact.’

‘Farewell, cruel death!’ said Lucy, taking the drink with a smile.

‘So, what’s happened in the agonising hour of separation since I last saw you?’ asked Hunter.

‘Well, Olivia told me she was pregnant.’

‘No kidding,’ said Hunter.

‘Funny you should use that phrase,’ said Lucy in an astute German accent.

‘Okay, so they’re kidding,’ said Hunter, ‘but are they serious? It’s unplanned – I assume.’

‘Yes, but not necessarily unwelcome,’ said Lucy, taking a sip of her death-threatening juice. ‘They’re talking it through in the next few days.’

Hunter leant over and gave Lucy a kiss on her beetroot-stained lips.

‘Apart from that, are you feeling well?’ he asked.

‘I feel great,’ said Lucy. ‘After talking to Olivia, I just lay here daydreaming and thinking about complementary medicine and why it works.’

‘Or whether it’s a placebo,’ said Hunter.

‘Placebos work,’ said Lucy. ‘That’s one of the things that interest me: why is a known therapeutic benefit treated as a glitch?’

‘Because it’s based on deception,’ said Hunter.

‘What deception?’ asked Saul, who had appeared at the terrace gate, photons raining on the sea behind him and the Calder turning very slowly into a new configuration. ‘Is it okay if I come in?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want to interrupt but there are a couple of developments on the Capo Santo deal that I’d like to run past you before I fly out. We can talk them through on the phone tomorrow, if you prefer.’

‘Come on in,’ said Hunter.

‘Hi, Saul,’ said Lucy. ‘The “deception” was the placebo effect, and I was asking, where’s the deception? If a patient thinks she’s going to get better and then does get better, why not call it persuasion, or self-healing? The deception is built into the experimental method, it’s not inherent to the effect.’

‘Right,’ said Saul, ‘the deception is in making sugar pills look identical to the pharmaceutical pills they are being tested against; the psychogenic effect is real.’

‘It’s hard to see how to harness it, though,’ said Hunter. ‘It’s been treated for so long as a sign of human frailty that it should be relegated to the Daniel Kahneman penal colony for cognitive bias, rotten intuition, groundless prejudice and misleading heuristics. I guess the real test is what happens to the effect if people know they are being given a sugar pill.’

‘That’s the beauty of it,’ said Saul, ‘it still works. Ted Kaptchuk is the top placebo guy. He’s at Harvard Med and he’s shown that what he calls “open label placebo” has a powerful effect. People know they are taking a sugar pill and sixty per cent of them still report significant relief of symptoms.’

‘How would you market that?’ said Hunter.

‘Call it Open Placebo,’ said Saul, ‘and get an endorsement from Harvard Med. The margins would be incredible: close to zero cost for manufacturing the product and at the same time a moral responsibility to augment the patient’s sense of receiving something valuable by pricing it up.’

‘Could they not be sugar pills?’ said Lucy. ‘It clashes with my diet, and with everyone’s dental health.’

‘No problem,’ said Saul, ‘but it mustn’t be something that anyone else is claiming is beneficial, otherwise it’ll get lost in the supplement zone.’

‘I’m enjoying the supplement zone,’ said Lucy. ‘Just because something is actually beneficial, like this fabulous juice, doesn’t mean that my conviction that it’s beneficial can’t give it a placebo turbo.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Saul. ‘Ted Kaptchuk’s work is all about expanding the definition of placebo beyond a trick pill used in a pharmaceutical trial. He wants to include and quantify the whole therapeutic drama surrounding prescriptions and procedures: the attentive listening, the rituals and the costumes, the diplomas on the wall, the authority of the healer.’

‘And being touched,’ said Lucy. ‘The laying on of hands – not in a faith-healer way, but just as an acknowledgement that my body is in need of attention. I’ve spent so much time in hospitals looking at computer images of my brain or talking to a doctor who is reading a printout of some test results. I think that’s one of the appeals of complementary medicine: the acupuncturist and the herbalist take my pulses and look at my tongue and touch my muscles; they are delivering the massive reassurance of dealing directly with my body and not just with my data.’

‘Totally,’ said Saul.

‘Listen, I must let you have your Capo Santo talk,’ said Lucy, beginning to sit up in the hammock.

‘You don’t have to go anywhere,’ said Hunter. ‘I’m going to lay my hands on you,’ he said, gently easing her back into a lying position, ‘now I know how much you like that.’

‘Why, Doctor, I feel inexplicably well,’ said Lucy, as she subsided into the hammock.

‘We call it personal haptic gap closure therapy, or PHGCT,’ said Hunter sagely.

‘I feel so lucky to be involved in this trial,’ said Lucy. ‘I hope there are some vaguely similar people in vaguely similar circumstances who are not receiving PHGCT as a control.’

‘Don’t worry, Lucy, this is an experiment structured to the most rigorous standards.’

Lucy smiled at Hunter, who rested his hand fondly for a moment on her tummy before turning to Saul.

‘So, where are we with The Inquisition?’ he asked.

‘They want fifty per cent,’ said Saul.

‘And I want to be non-executive Pope, with fifty per cent of global revenues,’ said Hunter.

‘I offered them ten per cent,’ said Saul.

‘And?’ said Hunter.

‘Holy indignation,’ said Saul.

‘Go up to fifteen in exchange for a vigorous advertising campaign, and twenty if they also market the Equanimity helmet, which we can rebrand for them without changing the algorithm: The Peace that Passeth Understanding, Blessed Mother of Tranquillity, whatever works for them.’

‘Father Guido told me they were having problems with their Stations of the Cross virtual reality program,’ said Lucy. ‘He became quite confessional over lunch. I think he thought the Espresso Martinis were just iced coffee, but in any case, please don’t do anything to get him into trouble; he’s such a sweet man.’

‘We’ll say that the only reason we’re considering profit sharing is thanks to his superhuman negotiating skills,’ said Hunter.

‘With Avatar, we’ve got the technology to help with that,’ said Saul.

‘No more profit sharing,’ said Hunter. ‘This techno-religion is going to be huge.’

‘How about less profit share and we fix the Stations?’ asked Saul.

‘That could work,’ said Hunter.

‘The beautiful thing is that whether it’s the Bhagavad Gita, or Golgotha, or Mara v Buddha under the Bodhi Tree, we can totally nail the journey with a combination of the scans we’ve already made and the VR from Avatar – which, by the way, turns out to be helping with the schizophrenics they designed it for.’

‘Yes, I was happy to see that,’ said Lucy. ‘I mentioned the good results to Martin Carr last week, Olivia’s dad, and he thought that exposing patients who are radically confused about what is real to an experience which is designed to seduce even the most robust realist might not be what is making them feel better.’

‘Maybe it helps precisely because it’s a known unreality,’ said Saul.

‘I ran the same sort of argument past Martin, but he was sceptical that the beneficial effects were taking place at that kind of cognitive level. He’s worked for years with paranoid schizophrenics and knows that if one of them, for instance, is terrified of getting on to a crowded train, that taking them into a basement, attaching heavy equipment to their heads and inducing hallucinations of simulated train passengers could easily be experienced by them as a satanic ritual designed to drive them mad.’

‘So, why the good results?’

‘Because often these patients have been so maltreated and are so frightened that being taken seriously, treated sympathetically, told there is a solution, looked after by experts, encouraged to share their responses, and so on, has a strong salutary effect.’

‘Another placebo,’ said Hunter.

‘Yes,’ said Lucy, ‘in the widest sense that we were talking about earlier: being cared for by people who know what they are doing. Once that trust is established, then all sorts of other things might come into play: the simulation could act as a way to externalise an inner voice, to place it in a narrative, letting out the evil element and projecting it safely.’

‘You’ve got to nail this Open Placebo thing,’ said Hunter.

‘I’m on it,’ said Saul.

‘I’m in it,’ said Lucy.

‘How about the known benefits of an early lunch, before Saul leaves for the airport?’

‘Perfect,’ said Lucy, swinging out of the hammock with a sense of gratitude at being looked after so well and at the same time with a bruise of sadness about the cloud encircling this peak of kindness and goodwill in her life.