The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (20 page)

‘I’m learning.’

‘I thought you knew everything,’ and she smiles. She seems to be looking at him with a sort of tender regard similar to the way he’s seen the scientists look at their flies, and he wonders if she’s carrying out an experiment. And who the subject of that experiment might be.

Dinner that night is just plain nasty and sometimes he wonders if the wife does it on purpose. No wonder, he thinks as he refuses pudding yet again, that he gets up so early in the morning to escape to work.

The flies have gone wrong. It happens occasionally, no point getting worked up about it. They’re more aggressive than normal so Lucy had problems doping them with the carbon dioxide, and then a test tube of them flew right into her face
before buzzing off. It’s the ones with the extra legs growing out of their heads and she screamed the place down. He doesn’t blame her. The writer looks on as he gives Lucy a hanky.

They all stand by the window of the lab, staring at the flies banging against the glass. ‘They’ll die soon,’ he says and this is meant to calm Lucy, but the writer replies, ‘That’s a shame.’ She’s studying the flies as if she’s reading a book.

‘What went wrong?’ she asks him.

‘Not sure.’ He’s thinking about how to get the lab’s money back from the company who provided them.

A fly dive-bombs Lucy and she screams all over again. Perhaps she smells funny to them. The writer makes a note in her notebook.

Over dinner he suggests to the wife his plan for cleaning the conservatory roof in spring.

‘About bloody time,’ she sniffs. ‘I’ve been asking you for ever.’

At least it’d get him out of the silent house in the evenings.

There haven’t been any mice for a few days and he’s almost forgotten about them as he walks up the silent, snow-bound corridor. She’s already there, leaning against the wall the way she does, waiting for him. They don’t speak. High above them, suspended from the ceiling, is a model of the double helix made out of the letters A, C, G and T. The sunlight casts shadows of the letters, making unpronounceable words that float onto the walls, the floor and her face. He’s never noticed these letters until now.

On the floor at her feet is a small oval object. A nut? It’s the size and shape of a large nut, but no, it seems to be a sort of squashed piece of matter. An animal turd, maybe. He squats down to inspect it.

‘What is it?’ he asks her.

She kneels on the floor by his side and looks closely.

‘Thank goodness it’s not a mouse,’ he says, almost laughing. The thing has no claws, no semi-stiff tale. No obsolescent eyes.

She starts to laugh herself, ‘Actually it is a mouse, in a manner of speaking. At least, it used to be a mouse.’

And then he understands. It’s an owl pellet. She pulls out her phone from some obscured fold in her clothes, ‘I want to take a photo of this.’

‘Wait –’ but she’s too quick and when she shows him the photo, it’s got his disembodied hand apparently floating above the lump of matter. He has a sudden and startling image of a mouse running up and down the corridor being pursued by a barn owl, white and ghost-like. He can see the dark shadow of the owl’s wings caused by the strip lights above it, hear the creak of moving feathers as it beats the air. See the mouse scampering in a zig-zag this way and that, trying to dodge its death. And then after the kill – the owl standing on the floor, its talons sliding on the shiny floor as it gobbles the mouse. The tail would be the last thing to be swallowed, maybe even still flickering with life as it protrudes from the owl’s beak. It feels like he’s remembering this rather than just making it up. He has seen a barn owl once, silently hunting near Loch Tay, turning and turning again in the weak winter light as it searched for its prey.

‘All that killing,’ she says, ‘just picture it.’ Her words are loud in his head as if she’s speaking inside him. Private words just for him. He stores the owl pellet in the drawer of his desk and goes to the lab to learn more about the machine.

When he gets home his wife isn’t there. Instead there’s a scrawled note propped up against the salt and pepper pots on the dining table – no doubt the traditional way of communicating these things in all those rubbishy books she reads – saying that she’s gone away for a few days and his dinner’s in the freezer. Even the shape of the writing manages to look accusing. It’s not the first time, but when he goes to
check the freezer there are more frozen boxes than ever before. Ignoring the ranks of boxes, he makes himself beans on toast and goes to eat in the green-lit conservatory, where the two of them have never eaten.

The last time she was away for a week. The time before that, a couple of nights. He wonders where she goes, but he knows he doesn’t wonder enough and that’s part of the problem. He sleeps well that night and wakes, feeling almost good about it all.

Later that morning he figures out what happened with the flies. When he finds the paperwork in his filing cabinet, he realises he made a typo in the gene specification. Wrong name – wrong gene – wrong flies. No matter, but Lucy’s off sick now because she says the flies bit her. Seems unlikely, but he’ll let her have a few more days off even if it’s just nerves.

Then he remembers about the mouse traps. He hurries to inspect them. None of them contain any dead mice but, as he feared, there’s an awful lot of fruit flies laying eggs and gorging themselves on the bits of Mars bars. The escaped flies have found their promised land.

He’s dealing with the eggs that they’ve bought to replace the flies, decanting them into test tubes when the writer appears.

‘You can just buy mutant flies?’ She’s surprised.

‘Why not? You order the mutations you want, such as red eyes or curly wings, and the eggs arrive in the post.’

‘Sounds a bit like Brave New World. It can’t have always been like that, surely?’

‘No.’ And he tells her about Muller, ‘There was a scientist from America in the Thirties who worked on fruit flies, and he had to leave America in a hurry because he was a Communist so he got a job in Germany, but then the Nazis came to power, so he had to leave there too and he went to Russia, but Stalin took against him, so he decided to go to Spain and fight in
the civil war there. But it got too dangerous so he stayed here in Edinburgh for a bit before going back to America. And everywhere he went, no matter what happened to him, he hung onto his suitcase of fruit flies. Because he’d bred them to have particular mutations.’ And he needed them, he thought. They were all he had after his first wife left him. Poor bastard. And for a moment he feels sorry for himself.

‘Like a travelling fly circus.’

He doesn’t like her flippant tone. ‘Not exactly. It was in aid of science. He sacrificed a lot to hang onto those flies.’ He’s finished with the eggs so he goes to start work on the machine. She follows him and they both peer inside it as it runs through its now-routine daily calibration. It’s doing a dance, he thinks, as the metal tips float move from left to right and up and down. An elegant dance that he has choreographed. There should be music.

‘What are the square things with all the little holes punched in them?’

‘The holes are called wells and the square things are the beds. And the shelves that they’re stored on – at the back – are called hotels.’ Ridiculously, he is blushing. And she’s smiling at his embarrassment. Perhaps she goes to hotels with other men and gets into bed with them. A wordless image of her and him appears in his mind.

Later that night after rejecting the frozen boxes again, he lies in bed and describes the image to himself. Like the barn owl, she’s swooping over him and he is naked beneath her, waiting for her to land. It is not a wholly pleasurable image, but he’s able to put a word to the feeling in his gut. Desire.

A week after owl-pellet day. He’s almost finished learning the ins and outs of the machine and she’s at the back of the lab writing in her notebook.

‘How would I go about having my genes sequenced?’

Her voice comes from behind him, her words float around
him. He thinks for a moment. ‘We have a sequencer here but it’s just used for the flies and for a few other experiments. We’ve never used it for human DNA, it would take forever. You’d be better off going to one of those companies that only do a handful of genes. They’re not too expensive.’ He wonders why she wants this information.

‘I want to be read, I want the machine to read me.’ She has seen into his mind again.

He turns to look at her and is astonished to see tears slipping down her face.

‘Like a book,’ he tries to joke, but still her tears keep falling until she stumbles out of the lab, presumably in search of tissues. He walks over to the corner where she’s been sitting, and he picks up her notebook, thinking that it might give him some clue about her and what she’s just asked him. When he glances inside at the last page she’s written, at first it looks like a list scribbled in pencil with words crossed out here and there, but after a bit he starts to make it out. It’s so peculiar that he makes a photocopy to take home:

Go hunting

take the genes of vetch

of milkweed

of toadflax

of meadowsweet

of the common or garden weed

and splice with owl

to make a
mutation
woman

who flies through the night

and grasps you in her talons

I’m the viper at your wedding

waiting to bite the bride

I’m the strands unravelled by your death

I’m alphabet matter, coded vegetation

and I will form words to be your
body
language

He was a writer, and that’s why I fell for him. Plain and simple. He knew the difference between metaphor and simile, he could take a bleeding lump of raw emotion and slice thin elegant prose from it. And he predicted us, our affair was defined by his stories that had already been published. It was meant to be. I would text him to tell him what I wanted him to do and when we met in hotel bedrooms and on night trains, he would obey my words.

I killed my husband. He said I was so kind and so soft, but he used me as a pillow. He smothered himself in our marriage, and he suffocated.

Oh, there was no actual death, no funeral. It’s all in my mind. But the body of the man I married has mutated. The cells I fell in love with have all died and been replaced by daughter cells. Does this explain the seven year itch, the need to be unfaithful? Why we fall in love – and fall in love again? Because we are no longer the same person?

When I was in bed with the writer he said I smelt of flowers, of roses and meadowsweet. He made me into a garland and twisted me around his body, and honey poured forth.

I fear all men and desire them, and would do anything to stop my husband crying over me. I fear them because I desire them.

I want you to look down the microscope at me and read me.

read – bead – bend – bond – bone

letter – bitter – bite – bile – cell

He manages to hide away the photocopy before she comes back to the lab. Glancing at her, he’d never guess that she’s just been crying. Her face is as smooth as an egg, her eyes are clear. She looks wiped clean.

Shortly after that the owl pellet disappears, even though his desk drawer is usually locked and nobody else has the key. So all he has is the memory of finding it, and the images of her and the owl. He even keeps an eye out as he walks between the bus stop and the building each morning and evening but he never sees any owls. Perhaps they’re hiding in the trees nearby. Just biding their time and waiting for the mice.

At the weekend he decides to make a start on the roof. The ladder’s where he left it after the last aborted attempt, so he props it against the wall and climbs up. If he works hard, maybe he’ll sleep and not lie in bed thinking those thoughts. Maybe the wife’ll come back and it’ll be ok this time.

The roof’s worse than ever, coated with a layer of green algae that resists his fingernails and clumps of moss that have settled along all the edges. He feels disheartened. It’ll take a fair amount of elbow grease to shift this lot. But he can imagine the wife’s delight when she notices the full moon through the sparkling clear roof above her as she sits – as they sit together – side by side. If you’re admiring a view, you don’t have to speak to each other. Nature can fill in the gaps. He’s seen enough couples sitting in their cars at the beach, facing the water. Some of them are old too, they’ve made it. They must have been silent together for a long time, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything bad. It gives him hope.

He manages to clear an area about a foot square. But it still isn’t great because now it looks worn and scratched. Perhaps his scrubbing has damaged it. When he peers down from the top of the ladder all he can see in the conservatory is a pile of beer cans and the remains of last night’s take away.

In contrast, the machine is shiny, its metal tips so elegant as they dance through the box of air inside the gleaming glass canopy. He likes to watch the liquids shoot out of the tips and straight into the wells. The machine always gets it right now. And it doesn’t need light, it has no eyes. So, one evening when
everyone else has left, he turns the lab lights off, one by one, until the only way he can see his way back to the robot is from the glow of the console. He stands in the darkness touching its metal flank, and the smooth hum of its innards makes his hand tremble.

She tells him that she’s sent off a sample to one of those companies. It’s a crude process compared to what they can do with the sequencer in the lab, you only get a few hundred or so genes mapped out, but it’s enough to say whether you’re more than averagely susceptible to diabetes, whether you’ve got Viking heritage, and that type of thing.

A few weeks later she comes to him with the results printed on a sheet of paper which she hands over without speaking.

‘This is odd,’ he says, ‘they’ve got you down as 99% likely to have red hair and blue eyes.’ And you’re so dark, he wants to add, but he feels shy about commenting on her looks. ‘It must be wrong,’ he continues, ‘you should write and tell them they must have got your sample mixed up with someone else’s. I’m sure it happens sometimes. It’ll just be a mistake.’