two days later
Perched on a high stool in the lab, Sue stared down the microscope at sample 5604/3, one of the flies she had allowed to hatch from its pupa, and then chilled the life out of, in the interests of research and for the benefit of mankind. She had already been through the formalities of its measurements: length, width, wingspan, weight. Now she was taking a closer look inside.
Dissection was always enjoyable, even when there was more blood, tissue and guts involved than with an insect. Getting inside the creature to see how everything worked; the satisfying first cut, the parting of the skin to reveal the organ systems, then organs, tissues and blood vessels. She felt a kind of religious gratitude towards her subject, wherever it sat in the food chain, for dedicating its corpse to science. This in turn motivated her desire to maximise the opportunity to learn, so that her volunteer had not died in vain. Today’s exhibit was no different, although it had had little choice in its destiny.
Sue had always been fascinated by insects; two hundred million of them for each one of us, conquering every part of the planet, from the Saharan silver ant, to the synchronous fireflies of the Great Smokey Mountains. The diminutive desert ant was the world’s fastest sprinter, capable of running its own body length in less than one hundredth of a second. ‘That’s the equivalent of four hundred miles an hour for a human,’ she had told one man on a first date – and watched his eyes glaze over.
And the synchronicity of the fireflies? They flashed repeatedly in time with their peers, as part of their mating ritual. In May 2019, after a successful bid for a viewing spot, and armed with a fold-up chair and gallons of insect repellent, Sue had travelled to Elkmont, Tennessee, to watch their dazzling foreplay. And of course there was her current area of interest: the protein- and calcium-rich, natural decomposer, the black soldier fly.
She checked her watch and switched on the radio, an early noughties relic from her predecessor, who had maintained that the insects liked the human voice, and who had played them radio programmes incessantly, to fill the gaps of human absence. He hadn’t approved of Sue’s other nurturing theories but, on this point, at least, they had agreed. Sue tuned the radio from music to talking, turning the volume down low, so that she could listen in or zone out, according to her preference.
She had just reached a tricky bit of the dissection, opening up the stomach, when Dr Adrian Edge’s voice broke into her thoughts: ‘Good morning and welcome to my show,’ he said, his silky tones more muffled than in the flesh, as they winged towards her from the speaker.
Sue paused, knife in hand. She had tried to shrug off her interaction with Dr Edge outside Tanners’ Hall. She had always possessed a sense of hearing at the extreme end of the human range, but it was less what she’d heard and more his attitude; the way he’d dismissed her with his puerile humming before they’d even been introduced. Women working as scientists often found men responded in this way, disparaging their achievements, decrying them as unfeminine for their interest in clinical things. Marie Curie’s solution had been to marry another scientist. Sue had found her scientist acquaintances tended to prefer less serious partners, presumably as an antidote to their day job, but perhaps that observation was skewed – a result of her own self-preservation mechanisms kicking in.
‘This morning’s programme is the first of a series,’ Dr Edge continued, ‘in which I’ll be speaking directly to women, all over the world, who work in areas relating to the science of food.’
Sue dropped her scalpel and slapped her hand down on top, to prevent it from rolling off the desk and the blade caught the skin of her palm, nicking it and drawing blood. She swore, more at the radio than at the knife, and lifted her hand to her mouth, before hesitating and, instead, watching the red liquid bubble and pool. There had been no blood with Brett Ingram. No. He had died a sudden, violent death, but without any external injuries – or none visible. The others might have been more shocked than she was to discover he was really dead; Sue knew about death without blood.
There wouldn’t be any blood now either, not even inside his veins. The pathologist would have drained it all away and returned his body to his loved ones, empty, a dried-out husk; less weight for the coffin bearers.
She looked down her microscope again – at the incision she had made into the fly’s stomach cavity – and the whiff of putrid organic matter reached her nostrils, but there was still no blood. Insects do have blood, just not the same as ours. She’d explained that to one of the technicians only last week, when she was eating her lunch and he’d come in to collect some equipment. Insect blood wasn’t red though – just a yellowish liquid that transported nutrients, hormones and waste products around their bodies. She’d joked to him that horror films wouldn’t be quite so terrifying if humans had watery yellow blood. He’d nodded and left.
‘Today’s guest is…’ Dr Edge, on the radio, was still speaking. Sue grabbed a tissue, pressed it onto her palm and closed her fingers tightly around it. But any thought of Dr Edge and his rudeness automatically led back to Brett, and Sue was determined not to allow herself to think about him. No way. Because if she did… She tried to focus on her specimen and on her work, cutting carefully down from the stomach and watching its contents ooze out onto her slide. That was better. Keeping occupied was the best way to forget. And Sue had plenty of things she wanted to forget about.