Before I can turn to lock my front door behind me, I connect with a huddled mass on my doorstep and almost lose balance. A body stirs beneath my size tens.
‘What the…?’
A confusion of black hair appears from under a gaudily coloured leather jacket. Aaron looks at me with dead eyes, a fleeting uncertainty growing into recognition as his brain engages. He staggers to his feet.
‘I was ringing the bell but you didn’t answer.’
I test my buzzer. It works fine. Aaron was probably ringing the downstairs flat; the Polish couple moved out a month ago. ‘What are you doing here? Did you sleep on my doorstep?’ He sheepishly lowers his gaze, then rotates his shoulder and cricks his neck.
Under the morning sun, I evaluate Aaron scientifically. His bottom teeth are faintly yellowed by the tetracycline he was prescribed to combat his teenage acne, the only remaining traces of which are marginally oversized pores between his temples and quizzical brown eyes. He could do with some more of this sun’s ultraviolet, a week’s sleep, a haircut.
‘So, what’s up?’ I ask.
‘This is pretty embarrassing. I don’t really remember why I came here. I think I was, you know… I wanted to check how you were. Your dad and everything…’ He’s hungover. The way he checks his watch tells me he wishes he’d woken earlier and hightailed it long before I left for work.
This is hardly a recurrent problem, but Aaron does seem to have issues with the fact that I no longer drink. He respects the fact that I’m teetotal, and doesn’t attempt – too often – to coerce me into joining him, but old habits are harder to break for him than they were for me. And that’s what I am to him: a habit. Neither of us wants to admit that alcohol was a major thing binding our friendship together and so we carry on as we did, with me holding a lemonade. I’ve been told that the abstainer represents enlightenment to the alcoholic – and if Aaron got so drunk on a Sunday night he thought sleeping on my doorstep was a good idea, that’s probably what he is – the proof that it can be done. But a part of him thinks I’ve let him down and, even if he doesn’t know it himself, he’s hanging around to see when – and how hard – I fall off the wagon.
‘Hey, I forgot to mention,’ he announces, rooting around for conversation. ‘That tasty creature you work with called me yesterday. I tried to put her off you but…’
‘Her name is Mariana,’ I snap back.
Aaron wears his shock like a handprint upon the cheek. My taxi to work arrives.
‘I’m only joking,’ he says. ‘Look, I promise to back off if you like her.’
My hand is on the front passenger door when Aaron jumps, uninvited, into the rear of the cab. By way of apology, I get in the back alongside him. Though we’ve occasionally fought, in that cagey, territorial way men do over male friends, we’ve never quarrelled over a woman.
‘I’m sorry, Aaron. I’m not feeling myself today.’
‘It’s okay,’ he replies, over-casually, yawning. He smells of smoke and a kind of campsite mustiness.
Aaron details his night as we swing our way into the Crouch End traffic. The school run has clogged every inch of asphalt and white van drivers holler their irritation over muffled breakbeats and organ-quaking basslines.
I’m less eager to start the day, but this is more than Monday-morningitis; all I’m bound to be doing for the foreseeable future is rooting around for solutions to the EasyBreathe debacle.
We drop Aaron off at Turnpike Lane. ‘Fancy doing something next weekend?’ he asks. I notice he’s peeled off the No Smoking window sticker and re-adhered it in a right-angled fashion. I’m used to this sort of Obsessive-Compulsive behaviour but the driver looks at him as he might regard someone who’s defecated on his back seat.
‘Yeah. I’ll call you.’
As I watch him mooch off from the kerb my words retain a defensive knell, like I’m killing off a bad date. He’s a good man, Aaron, and though I’m a little embarrassed about the manner in which I confessed to liking a certain work colleague, I’m glad I bumped into him: I won’t forget his promise to back off from Mariana.
The taxi jettisons me outside Syngestia’s new £7m laboratory and headquarters, a vast aircraft hangar of glass, and I scurry through the main foyer to the lifts, flashing my badge at the security behind the curved chrome reception desk. The scrubbed and watered rubber plants, parlour palms and ficus trees glisten in the air-conditioned foyer.
‘Meeting’s just about to start, Mr Marr,’ a semi-attractive woman I don’t recognise informs me, her headset’s thin black microphone hovering two inches in front of a plastic smile. Her words don’t register until I’ve arrived at my empty lab.
I slip on my white coat and catch the lift to the next floor, where the large assembly hall echoes with the murmuring of over a hundred scientists. Panic has stretched itself into most voices, creating a confederacy of sopranos. A frowning Mumbling Frank, by design or accident, has an empty seat next to him. I pretend I haven’t seen it and look around for Mariana.
She’s sitting over on the left-hand side, but the neighbouring seats are taken. I wave at her then sit two rows in front, where a number of places are still empty. A few seconds later, she joins me.
‘You’re late,’ she says, half-smiling. She’s without makeup as usual.
‘So you decided to stay with us, after all?’
‘Obviously.’ The jokey dig she bestows my ribs is probably an afterthought, designed to mask the displeasure inherent in her rejoinder.
When the bigwigs take to the stage a hush falls over the room. We’re told what most of us already know, that a new asthma drug by the name of EasyBreathe was ready, sold, that everything was done that, we thought, possibly could be in laboratory conditions but long-term reactions are now being exposed. Five years on, many test patients are developing gastric problems and our patent has been withdrawn until we can find out why. The tone of the meeting is grave; the corporate heads can’t understand how such a massive and potentially litigious side-effect has slipped through, how initial research was approved. It’s simply unheard of that a chemical compound, proven to be stable after years of research and with impurities already controlled to very low levels, is halted so close to manufacture. It’s not as if we don’t have other contracts going on, but this is a big one, what with the number of asthma and allergy sufferers increasing at their current rate.
We’re told we’ve got a month at best to work out the reason for the problem and the expression ‘All hands on deck’ ends the briefing. We shuffle off to our departments.
Mariana walks with me as far as my laboratory, leisurely spanking her thigh with a rolled-up wad of IT directives. We don’t talk. The loss of her week’s holiday has clearly pissed her off and I’m finding myself irrationally tongue-tied.
‘Do you want to do lunch later?’ she asks. Her lips are parted, inviting. Her eyes are curious dark slits.
‘Nice idea,’ I say, pressing my back against the wall to allow a couple of frowning technicians past. ‘I’ll come and find you later.’
She strolls off unhurriedly up the corridor, and I slide backwards through my laboratory door.
I welcome the air-conditioned peace of the lab, if not the crystal purity of the daylight skewering through the windows. There are five of us in here, including a mumbling Mumbling Frank.
Tired, I do what everybody’s probably doing. I procrastinate.
What a truly horrific, wondrous invention the internet is. A million ways to ignore your talents. According to a national news website, for instance, a forty-foot-wide asteroid by some drearily acronymous name has just missed our planet by 400,000 miles, passing through the exact position Earth was in only five hours before. If the asteroid had impacted it would have created an explosion twelve times as powerful as Hiroshima.
I can’t believe nobody’s making a bigger deal about this. Syngestia’s profit margins would look a lot less worrisome if one of those smashed into us. Some of the asteroids orbiting out there are so large they even have their own moons.
Somewhere in my childhood, an interest in astronomy clearly segued into a love of the behaviours of structures, of naming stuff, of evidence based on experiment and, sometimes, when I’m engaged in research the normal flow of time seems to accelerate. Lunch comes and goes and I don’t hear from Mariana.
She’s done a good job on my computer – indeed, the EasyBreathe product database powered up in less than half an hour – so it would be churlish not to thoroughly investigate the ingredients our failing medicine contains. I scroll through the computer looking for a particular microbiology paper, published when subcellular studies were first made in the fields of allergy and immunology. I find it and print it out. Though the lab’s airy breeze and cheap coffee has cleared my mind somewhat, I notice that my hands tremble, causing the paper to jump about so much that at one point I leave the world of metalloprotease and pylori to spin round with the intention of turning off a non-existent fan.
Syngestia have a vast number of medical articles in their databank and I read all day, sustaining myself with yet more vending machine cappuccinos. Throwing myself into this, hopefully lengthy, problem suddenly seems like the appropriate distraction from everything else in my life right now.
It’s therefore somewhat disappointing when, long after everyone else in the lab has gone home, I solve it.
I ring Phil, my department head, and, rather arrogantly, I’ll admit, tell him of my findings. He laughs. And it’s not a disbelieving, indulgent chuckle either. It’s a full-on, ‘That’s a good one,’ belly laugh. Yet another scientist with sense-of-humour issues. But I like Phil. He was on the interview panel when I auditioned for this gig and his warm, matter-of-fact attitude helped put this nervous upstart at ease.
‘Okay,’ I tell him, ‘in layman’s terms, I reckon the problem is down to a bacterium found in the intestines of thirty-five-percent of the population reacting to one of the ingredients in our new drug. We thought we’d countered any adverse reactions through the use of an inhibitor; however, this inhibition was itself stimulating an enzyme which we then had to add another inhibitor to inhibit. The side effect of this is a quasi-quiescent infection of the intestines in said thirty-five-percent of the population.’
‘Oh, you’re not joking.’ He sounds rejected.
‘It should be stabilised by bovine serum albumin.’
There’s a long silence from the other end of the line, before he demands to see me in his office.
‘It’s Lucien, isn’t it?’ The managing director wearily rises from his leather armchair to shake my hand.
‘Lucas,’ I correct.
Besides Phil, there are two bigwigs in the office, called back in to work at short notice to speak to me, peering over spectacles with fingers locked into mini pagodas. I doubt either of them have any more idea what goes on in the pharmacology labs these days than a meat-eater does about the true contents of his sausages.
‘We’ll look into it,’ Phil says, handing the microbiology paper to the third suit, who hurries out of the office with it as though it’s a cipher for a wartime decoder. Although, to be fair, it’s likely someone in government is watching the events at Syngestia closely.
‘Tell me what you do here,’ the nameless director says to me.
‘I’m on the second floor,’ I explain. ‘Pharmacogenomics.’
A blank face, like he hasn’t heard.
I attempt to elaborate and end up doing my finest impression yet of Mumbling Frank. ‘…more powerful medicines, better, safer … dramatically reduce the number of deaths and hospitalisations that occur each year as the result of adverse drug response … more accurate methods of determining appropriate dosages … a decrease in the overall cost of health care…’ His face, halitosis-close, is as red as a sergeant major’s. ‘…family DNA … genetic qualities passed down … always endangered by the things that kill our parents…’
He’s still staring at me. I finish my speech, more through having run out of confidence in it than by arrival at any kind of conclusion. It’s damn bright in here. Sunspots march across my cornea, making the walls appear to be sprayed with blood.
‘Do you know what fascinates me about medicine, Lucien?’ the red face says, finally relaxing back into its leather chair, the only vaguely imperial touch to an otherwise sterile and minimalist office. ‘Why I get out of bed, day after day, and walk these corridors? Medicine makes our lives longer, easier. But it will never end. We will never find a cure for finding a cure. We’re looking to defeat cancer, for example, and yet we’re spreading that very disease, propagating it through technology, microwaves, supermarket bacon. We keeping ourselves busy by chasing our tails, expensively inventing ways to counterbalance our lifestyles and mop up after society’s ills. Promiscuity… binge drinking… drug abuse.’
‘You’ve been here how long, Lucas?’ Phil cuts in. He’s obviously heard it all before. He has a kinder face than the other man, but is no less rotund. Funny how obesity wasn’t mentioned in his colleague’s list of modern sins. He moves, with the slow awkwardness of sciatica, to the window and perches uncomfortably on the ledge. ‘Two years, isn’t it?’ He knows how long I’ve been here.
‘Something like that, sir,’ I say, aware that sounds like no time at all. In fact, my route here, my entire history – the Chemistry, Biology and Physics A-Levels taken in a backlash against the arts; my doctorate graduation ceremony at Oxford; the fast-track fellowship at a rival company; arriving at Syngestia to find I was a full ten years younger than my immediate colleagues – now seems little more than phases from a dream.
Phil’s looking at me with his head on one side, like my father’s budgie. ‘You know your stuff, I’ll give you that. It could well be this… enzyme you’ve mentioned that’s at the root of our problem. We’ll investigate. On another matter entirely, though… How are you coping?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You’ve recently had a family bereavement, have you not?’
‘Oh… Well, we’re awaiting confirmation of an inquest. No one quite knows what happened. I mean, my mother thought he’d had a heart attack but…’
The sergeant major’s attitude towards me doesn’t change. He turns to the window, sighs. ‘Philip, give this fellow two weeks’ leave if you think he needs it.’
Phil assures me, in the fawning manner of a poll-battered public servant, that he’d be only too happy to grant me time off.
‘On that subject,’ I say. ‘I’ve got a friend in IT who’s had her holiday withdrawn. Now, I’m fairly sure my theory about EasyBreathe will be proved correct. You won’t sort the problem out overnight but the boys in Pharmacokinetics can narrow the field off the back of my data, I’m sure. She’s not essential to the programme at this stage.’
‘No?’
Phil looks for help from his superior, who wafts the air with a loose wrist in what strikes me as a very Italian gesture and, after a scornful clearing of his throat, enquires, ‘Do I sense a conspiracy here? What is this? Are you two doing it, Lucien?’
I chuckle, sympathetically; the managing director’s clumsy attempt to wield the lingua franca of a subsequent generation has somehow made him appear a monstrous pervert.
Acknowledging this, a blushing Phil leads me to the door. ‘I’ll see what I can do, Lucas,’ he says in a whisper.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand. Where’s the “conspiracy”?’
‘Mariana was the one who informed us about your father. I guess it looks a bit… I don’t know. Strategic, shall we say? Anyway, leave it with me.’ He all but winks. ‘And, Lucas…? Sorry again to hear about your old man.’