Acid Song (12 page)

‘I don’t see how you can call it glorious, Sir, when all it does is reduce us so.’

A careful first speaker’s voice, measured and polite.

‘And what do you mean by that?’ Richard replied, the technique which in his later years had replaced recommending readings. Few students could maintain the momentum of their opening statement. Lack of experience makes counterpunchers of the young.

Thomas Walden gave the question full consideration, apparently untroubled by what for many would have been an awkward silence. No um to hold the place, no bluster. A strange boy, Richard thought
at the time. The sort that years later, standing alone in a laboratory, looking at a photo of your self, you might remember.

‘I suppose I mean, wouldn’t it be ironic, if all our big brains ended up gifting us was an insight into the emptiness of it all? What would we do, if we found out there was, well, I don’t want to sound melodramatic – but nothing more to it in the end? Just biology. What would we do then?’

‘We could always wait for Godot,’ Richard replied, an unworthy remark. Dismissive. He could have invited the boy for coffee, listened to his concerns, led him through the arguments. But he was busy, perhaps: had a meeting to get to, didn’t have the time to give, or didn’t trust the boy to be worthy of the investment. Whatever the case, that was the last time the boy stayed behind, and a year later biology had the final say. Meningitis.

And what would he have said to Thomas – if he’d known that, by the measure of the uncountable time remaining – the boy was so old? George Bernard Shaw once said of evolutionary theory,
‘There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honour and aspiration’
– and a hundred times Richard had used that line to open some address. That he may proceed to counter it. Science, he had spent a career explaining, is like a builder inspecting a house for restoration. It removes from our stories only those planks which are rotten, that they may be replaced before the structure itself is compromised. Far from destroying our most precious stories, science keeps them strong.

For perhaps twenty-eight years the metaphor had proven adequate. But everything corrodes. For wasn’t the truth of it that for all his bluster, staring at this damned photograph made him feel not triumphant but tiny, just as the boy had warned? Richard Bradley, renowned professor, loving father, muddling husband, fickle friend, contemplating his own sorry recipe. Forty-six chromosomes, twenty-two pairs plus the telltale male mismatch. Written along them the
secret code, all three-point-one thousand million bases of it; scattered amongst those the twenty-one thousand genes required to assist in the construction of exactly one of him. Here was the recipe for his sweet tooth, his arthritis, his thinning hair, his failing eyes, his impatience. And here, in the end, the end itself. He – a collection of a hundred trillion cells, which copied itself and its genetic message again and again, fighting to maintain pattern in a world defined by entropy – was destined to end in error. Transcription mistake by transcription mistake he would be rendered inoperable, as we all are. It was a race between the decaying of the body and the flowering of the mind. What type of animal would ever find it necessary to ask these questions, to stare so resolutely into the face of God?

As atheists go, Richard was a devoutly religious man. He had a taste for religion’s imagery, and shared its sense of awe. Before him were the burn marks of life itself, the signal of the code which nearly four billion years ago learned the trick of assembling itself, and from there – well from there came here. Four billion, a number which can so easily slip past the tongue without the mind doing its work and grasping some sense of the magnitude. It was a million times longer than the time since the rise of the first civilisations. If the time of life were a football field, then humanity’s first written records appear somewhere a tenth of a millimetre from the goal line: less than the thickness of a blade of grass. He explained it this way to his students but saw in their eyes that this meant too little to them. The damnable work involved in shifting perspective, in seeing oneself as small.

In Richard’s university days, back when the virus of curiosity first took hold, a professor told him: ‘There are only three big questions worth being interested in. Why is there something in this universe, and not nothing? How did life come about? And how did it in time develop the ability to know itself?’

The hard problems. An elaborately choreographed ritual of
ignorance and disappointment, curiosity pulling them closer, contradiction hurling them back. The second question, his question, was closest to being solved.

Richard had no trouble imagining the beginning. In amongst the chemical soup, at a certain speck of space and time, circumstance gave birth to crystals with the most remarkable property, the tendency to make copies of themselves. Perhaps the most unlikely of all coming togethers, but it had happened, so what then are we to make of unlikely? If the experiment was rerun a million times, maybe it would never again occur. Yet it had occurred, that was the apparent truth of the matter. Without cause or meaning, oblivious to implication or purpose. The new creation myth.

Tonight, with the polls closed, and the nation holding its breath, waiting to be brought news of the collective resolution, Richard would be the keynote speaker in the celebration of The Institute’s first thirty years. People would gather to pay homage not to the details of its discoveries, but the ideas behind them, the meaning. For The Institute was, in the end, an agenda. So he would claim at least, at the start of his address. And they, the colleagues, students, reporters, benefactors, rivals and refugees, would happily receive his message. It was what they came to hear. What they would hear, even if he did not say it. They would come to be reminded of the agenda, to bask in its righteousness. After three decades of peddling the message, Richard would have no difficulty mouthing the platitudes. ‘We may be constrained by our physical world, but we are not defined by it.’ An idea, he would tell them, has a history which can not be read in our DNA. If you want evidence of the non-physical, he would say, look no further than a simple joke. One told and retold a million times over, spreading like a virus, mutating, reshaping, and yet at every telling colliding with that most physical, most human phenomenon, the smile. The relationship between the world of the physical and the world of the idea is this simple, and this mysterious.

Easy, reassuring stuff. And they would applaud with more generosity than such recycling deserved. For this was his role. To climb the mountain on their behalf, and come back with word of the view. Yet this morning the nagging doubt that had brought him back to the lab told a different story. His last hope was that he had made a mistake, but that hope was fading. If he had a colleague he could trust, he would get them to check his processes. Eventually, if the results ever became public, they would be subjected to this sort of scrutiny. And it would become public, of course, one way or another. It wasn’t feasible he was the only person asking these questions. As the technology advanced, finding the answers would only become easier.

Never before had Richard ever been so frightened of an idea. Alone in the lab on a Saturday morning, stepping across the floor with particular care, as if any unconsidered movement might set off a landslide. He had told Elizabeth he needed to get a copy of his speech off the work computer. An unnecessary lie: he could easily have told her he was just going to tidy up some research findings, and she wouldn’t have asked any more. It had fallen out anyway, without effort or thought.

The computer hummed and the screen glowed bright blue. Richard typed in his password, and clicked through the tangle of subfolders and files he had used to obscure the data’s address. The stuttering code of the gene in question spread itself across the screen. He highlighted the variant section and scrolled down through the alignments. It looked as simple as a single base mistranslation. A mistake made perhaps only once in humanity’s history, and destined, like every error before it, to spread or to disappear. Five thousand years on, and still it spread. This one was a stayer.

Each set of numbers represented part of a life. Richard did not know the individuals’ real names: each was identified by a number. Yet he knew so much about them: their age, position in the family,
aptitude test results; it was the richness of the data that had attracted him to the study. He flicked through the profiles, half hoping that this time something new would show itself. But four times he had performed the analysis from scratch, and four times it had produced identical results.

Richard navigated his way to the incriminating screen, exploring the pain compulsively, like a tongue probing a decaying tooth. A correlation table, distributing intellectual aptitude variance amongst the usual suspects: region, school, income, household structure. And there, hanging off the end, the strongest predictor of all: the elephant in the room, not just unspeakable but made invisible by fear. A single gene. Less than that, a single, simple mutation. That such a thing was possible was disturbing enough. That its spread should be so clearly contained by geography, that it had a racial profile, that was terrifying. Once again Richard looked, and once again he could not find the place in his head where such information might fit. Which of his most cherished thoughts would survive the rearranging, in order for this mutant to be accommodated?

The data was only suggestive, of course; the study was not big enough to provide conclusive evidence. More work would need to be done. And he would not do it. Every time he visited this unholy shrine he told himself the same thing, he would not be this secret’s midwife. Yet he returned, again and again. He did not delete the data. It fascinated him, made him shiver with the thrill of the forbidden. He could not yet say if it was principle or fear then, that kept him from the next step. William’s argument was a strong one. Last night Richard had almost told him, forced his own hand in the manner of a coward.

Richard closed down the computer. From the lab window he could see the university library, and beyond that, the city, smudged grey by the persistent cold. It would take determination to vote today. The uncommitted had a further reason for their silence.

‘ARE YOU GOING to get out of bed or what?’

She wasn’t, Sophie realised, being offered a choice.

‘What time is it?’ she shouted from beneath the covers. Outside the rain was battering her window. An excellent reason to stay in bed. Saturday. Another excellent reason.

‘Time to be getting up.’

And that was a crap reason. But reasoning, Sophie knew, didn’t come into it. Karen, her mother (she’d insisted upon Karen, ever since Mark, who still insisted upon Dad, left) had a way of … insisting. A taste for battle. She would fight harder and longer, until the only choices left were to obey or leave.

For a while after Dad left – six months by Sophie’s count – Karen gave up on fighting and drank instead. Those Saturday mornings had been for sleeping. It ended when Sophie was stood down for three days at school (a friend who needed protecting and a tired teacher spoiling for a scrap) and Karen began to worry she was rearing a delinquent daughter. Karen attended a course on single parenting – hoping to find there a single father who didn’t tell lies – but returning only with a determination to get fit, give up the drink, and put time aside for her daughter.

The gym membership had since lapsed and the drinking had crept back in, but so far Sophie’s fading mother wasn’t showing any
sign of letting the third resolution lapse. Friday nights were mother/daughter time; they rented DVDs, drank vodka and ate chocolate biscuits. Karen would ask Sophie questions about her life, which Sophie would deflect. Rather than let this evasion deter her, Karen would simply use it as an invitation to share her own worries and frustrations: the injustice of the job she hated; the deficiencies of the man she had married, and the cruel indifference of a world that had no place for ageing women. Which of them was to be mined depended on many things: the movie they had rented; the time that had elapsed since her last attempt at marital reconciliation; where she found herself in the monthly Visa cycle – but every time the teary conclusion was the same.

‘I just don’t want you to make my mistakes. That’s all girl, do you hear me? Just tell me you won’t, and this won’t all be wasted.’

It was an easy reassurance to give. Sophie would make many mistakes, she was sure, but they would be her own. Mr Krane could say what he liked, but biology couldn’t explain everything. Karen had stayed at school only until the end of the fifth form, and with typing and shorthand under her belt, had gone off to keep books for a haulage firm. Sophie’s dad was a diesel mechanic. Sophie was conceived in the back of a sheep trailer, during a Christmas party, a detail which Sophie was sure she would never share with her offspring. Sophie by contrast was bound for university. She didn’t know what she would study yet … something with late starts.

‘Do I have to come and drag you out?’

‘Okay, I’m fucking coming.’

‘Watch your language.’

That was a laugh.

Sophie turned the shower up to scalding and felt the warmth seep into her bones. He had texted her last night, a simple SRRY. Would an extra letter really have been that much trouble? Sophie had ignored him. He would have been drunk by then anyway, and this morning
wouldn’t even remember sending it. In the mirror Sophie’s body took on its usual disappointing form. She wasn’t fat, or thin, or short, or tall, or muscular, or anything. That was the problem, or as near to the problem as she could come. It was her body’s sheer ordinariness which crushed her, a collection of uninspiring parts which collectively added to something less. As if she was growing old already, without ever having been young. Her skin didn’t have the smooth glow of her friends’, but instead was dry and prone to irritation. Her breasts hung too low, and her hips flared comically wide above her narrow legs. In health classes they told them to learn to love their bodies, that it was the most magnificent thing they would ever own. Which was fucking ridiculous. Health classes were fucking ridiculous. She was glad she had outgrown them.