this what you do? Your research area, I mean?’
‘Huh? This? God, no,’ she said, waving her needle. ‘This is crude, painfully, painfully crude.’ The alcohol had evaporated away, and Cameron wiped the vein a second time. The syringe looked bigger close up, huge in fact. ‘With real diseases, serious disease, you actually need to reprogram the white blood cells, literally write strings of program code to remind them how to do the job.’ She poked at his vein to make it stand out. ‘Not silicon chips, obviously, the body needs chemical code. Amino acids. Peptides.’ She levelled the syringe. ‘Little prick.’
‘I have not,’ muttered Bryn, trying not to watch.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Nothing. Forget it.’
Dr Wilde had found the vein without difficulty, and with calm expertise, slowly and smoothly injected the solution into his arm. It was almost totally painless.
‘Done,’ she said. She pulled the rubber band from her hair and shook it into its previous uncombed mess.
‘Thanks. Like I say, I have a full day of meetings tomorrow, so anything which helps …’
‘Tomorrow?’ She snorted out through her nose, possibly her version of a laugh. ‘You’ll need to cancel.’
‘I can’t cancel. That’s the point. That’s why I came.’
She shrugged. It wasn’t her problem. ‘Try to eat properly while you’re recovering. That means no caffeine, no alcohol, no sugar, no dairy, nothing processed, not much fat, no additives, no allergens.’
‘Grass. I’ll eat grass.’
‘Organic, where possible. Thirty bucks for the injection, please. You can give me another twenty for the consultation, if you feel like supporting my research.’
Bryn rolled down his sleeve and groped for his jacket.
‘It’s nice to work on humans every now and then,’ she continued. ‘Mostly I just stick needles into rats.’ Her words came out in grunts as she cleared her microscope bench of the litter. The compartmented tray, now rejoicing in twelve drops of finest Welsh blood, she waved in the air. ‘Human blood. A prized commodity. Can I keep it?’
‘Be my guest. Punching people is part of your research? Or was that just for fun?’
Wilde was nonplussed. She didn’t understand jokes, it seemed.
‘It wasn’t research. I just wanted to explain … Sorry.’
Bryn pulled a hundred bucks from his wallet. ‘Can you give me a receipt?’ He needed it to claim his expenses. She looked vacantly round the mountainous paper landscape in its inky darkness and pools of light. She didn’t do receipts. ‘OK. Don’t worry. Just keep it. Good luck with your research.’
‘Thanks. Sorry I hurt you.’
‘That’s OK. Not to worry. It’s fine. Thank you.’
‘Here, have this,’ she said abruptly. She found a business card and scribbled on the back of it, a hundred dollars, received with thanks. He took it and caught a taxi back to his hotel downtown, musing on what he’d witnessed.
He’d seen blood cells recharged and reinvigorated. He’d seen blood cells destroying invaders like Schwarzenegger on speed. He’d seen a failing immune system rebuilt under the microscope.
This time, of course, the invaders had been chicken, the magic show no more than a party trick. But if, as she’d implied, Dr Wilde could repeat her trick with serious illness, then it wasn’t just a trick she’d discovered. It was the Holy Grail.
4
Bryn had as much intention of spending the next day in his hotel room as he had of giving all his money away to charity, but there are times when things move beyond your control. By eleven p.m. his temperature had shot up to 105°F and hung there all night. Shivering underneath a mountain of duvets, he cancelled everything he’d had arranged and waited for the crisis to pass. By evening, his temperature had come down, his chest had cleared, and his appetite returned with a vengeance. Other than a little temporary weakness, he was as fit as a fiddle and ready for action.
Making a rapid check of flight times, he made a dash for the airport through rainswept streets, catching the last overnight flight into London. He slept well through the journey, woke sufficiently refreshed to manage a king-sized breakfast, and was first off the plane on arrival.
Strictly speaking he should have gone straight into work, but it was a grey and chilly morning at a grey and ugly Heathrow, and he found himself asking the cabbie to take him home instead. He’d shower, shave and have a second full-size breakfast, before going into the office.
And there was another motivation. For several years his marriage had been poor, possibly even collapsing. He and his wife, Cecily, had their fair share of relationship problems, of course, but on top of that, theirs was a banker’s marriage. It wasn’t that Bryn cared about his career and Cecily didn’t. On the contrary, she had been brought up to consider money to be more important than oxygen. But there was a cost: work came first, the marriage came second. Out of their last fifty-two weekends, only five had been completely free of work.
And so a stop for breakfast and a shower wouldn’t just be pleasant, it would be Bryn’s way of showing Cecily that she still mattered to him, a small step towards reconstructing their relationship. He’d been taking a lot of such steps recently, hopeful that they were clawing their way towards something better.
Outside his tall, white-fronted Chelsea home, he paid off the cabbie, climbed the steps, let himself in, called upstairs and downstairs, got no answer – and then saw it, a note, folded on the hall table. He opened the note and read it.
5
And read it again, in a mounting blur. ‘Dearest Bryn,’ – that was nice, wasn’t it? A good affectionate start. No problems there. ‘This is just to say that I’ve decided to leave you.’ Bryn gripped the banister and collapsed heavily down on the lower stair. What do you mean, ‘just to say’? What’s just about that? ‘Dearest, this is just to say I’ve burned the house down, murdered the kids, slaughtered the neighbours, eaten the cat.’ Bryn breathed deeply. Maybe he was missing a trick here. Maybe she’d meant to say something else altogether. ‘Dearest Bryn, I’ve decided to leave you … some breakfast in the oven, some gloves in your pocket, a photo, a love letter, a billet doux.’
No, it didn’t say that. Definitely not.
He rubbed his eyes roughly, and blinked to focus. Try though he might, he missed the next few sentences and only caught up with Cecily’s beautiful handwriting several lines later. ‘I’m sorry, darling, I could see you really trying to mend things, but I believe it wasn’t meant to be. I’ve realised that it’s important to me to begin again, and that’s what I intend to do. Please don’t be silly and try to pursue me – it won’t work. You know me well enough by now, to know that my decisions are for ever.’
He did, and they were.
6
For a long time, at the foot of the long staircase, Bryn sat stunned and stupid, yet in a way not even surprised. These last few months, he’d felt like a man trying to rebuild a house during the earthquake-volcano-hurricane season: heroic, maybe; a loser, for sure. He crumpled the letter and threw it away. The scrumpled ball hit Cecily’s bow-legged rosewood table and made one of her Meissen vases ping with amusement.
Work. There was always work. At least at Berger Scholes he could harness all his energy into bullying the world into submission. It didn’t compensate for a failed marriage, but, by God, it was a good distraction. He heaved himself up and stumbled off to work.
A mistake.
On