‘Excuse me, you’re not going to smoke that, are you?’
Marcus closed his eyes. He hated the construction. He always wanted to reply with equal grammatical perversity: Yes, I’m not going to smoke that. No, I am going to smoke that.
‘Excuse me, I said you’re-’
‘Yes, I heard you the first time,’ said Marcus softly, turning to his right to see the speaker with whom he shared a single arm-rest, each two chairs being assigned only one between them in the long line of moulded plastic. ‘Is there a reason why I shouldn’t?’
Irritation vanished at the sight of his interlocutor: a slim, pretty Asian girl, with an alluring gap between her front teeth, army trousers and a high ponytail, who was holding in her lap (of all things!) a copy of his collaborative pop science book of last spring (with the novelist Surrey T. Banks), Time Bombs and Body Clocks: Adventures in Our Genetic Future.
‘Yes, there’s a reason, arsehole. You can’t smoke in Heathrow. Not in this bit of it. And you certainly can’t smoke a fucking pipe. And these chairs are welded to each other and I’ve got asthma. Enough reasons?’
Marcus shrugged amiably. ‘Yes, more than. Good book?’
This was a new experience for Marcus. Meeting one of his readers. Meeting one of his readers in the waiting lounge of an airport. He had been a writer of academic texts all his life, texts whose audience was tiny and select, whose members he more often than not knew personally. He had never sent his work off into the world like a party-popper, unsure where the different strands would land.
‘Pardon?’
‘Don’t worry, I won’t smoke if you don’t want me to. I was just wondering, is it a good book?’
The girl screwed up her face, which was not as pretty as Marcus had first thought, the jawline a tad too severe. She closed the book (she was halfway through) and looked at its cover as if she had forgotten which book it was.
‘Oh, it’s all right, I suppose. Bit bloody weird. Bit of a headfuck.’
Marcus frowned. The book had been his agent’s idea: a split-level high/low culture book, whereby Marcus wrote a ‘hard science’ chapter on one particular development in genetics and then the novelist wrote a twin chapter exploring these ideas from a futuristic, fictional, what-if-this-led-to-this point of view, and so on for eight chapters each. Marcus had university-bound sons plus Magid’s law schooling to think about, and he had agreed to the project for pecuniary reasons. To that end, the book had not been the hit that was hoped for or required, and Marcus, when he thought of it at all, thought it was a failure. But weird? A headfuck?
‘Umm, in what way weird?’
The girl looked suddenly suspicious. ‘What is this? An interrogation?’
Marcus shrank back a little. His Chalfenist confidence was always less evident when he strayed abroad, away from the bosom of his family. He was a direct man who saw no point in asking anything other than the direct questions, but in recent years he had become aware that this directness did not always garner direct answers from strangers, as it did in his own small circle. In the outside world, outside of his college and home, one had to add things to speech. Particularly if one was somewhat strange-looking, as Marcus gathered he was; if one was a little old, with eccentric curly hair and spectacles missing their lower rims. You had to add things to your speech to make it more palatable. Niceties, throwaway phrases, pleases and thank yous.
‘No, not an interrogation. I was just thinking of reading it myself, you see. I heard it was quite good, you know. And I was wondering why you thought it was weird.’
The girl, deciding at that moment that Marcus was neither mass murderer nor rapist, let her muscles relax and slid back in her chair. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Not so much weird, I guess, more scary.’
‘Scary how?’
‘Well, it’s scary isn’t it, all this genetic engineering.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yeah, you know, messing about with the body. They reckon there’s a gene for intelligence, sexuality – practically everything, you know? Recombinant DNA technology,’ said the girl, using the term cautiously, as if testing the water to see how much Marcus knew. Seeing no recognition in his face, she continued with more confidence. ‘Once you know the restriction enzyme for a particular, like, bit of DNA, you can switch anything on or off, like a bloody stereo. That’s what they’re doing to those poor mice. It’s pretty fucking scary. Not to mention, like, the pathogenic, i.e., disease-producing, organisms they’ve got sitting in petri dishes all over the place. I mean, I’m a politics student, yeah, and I’m like: what are they creating? And who do they want to wipe out? You’ve got to be seriously naive if you don’t think the West intend to use this shit in the East, on the Arabs. Quick way to deal with the fundamentalist Muslims – no, seriously, man,’ said the girl in response to a raised eyebrow from Marcus, ‘things are getting scary. I mean, reading this shit you just realize how close science is to science fiction.’
As far as Marcus could see, science and science fiction were like ships in the night, passing each other in the fog. A science fiction robot, for example – even his son Oscar’s expectation of a robot – was a thousand years ahead of anything either robotics or artificial intelligence could yet achieve. While the robots in Oscar’s mind were singing, dancing and empathizing with his every joy and fear, over at MIT some poor bastard was slowly and painstakingly trying to get a machine to re-create the movements of a single human thumb. On the flip side of the coin, the simplest biological facts, the structure of animal cells for instance, were a mystery to all but fourteen-year-old children and scientists like himself; the former spending their time drawing them in class, the latter injecting them with foreign DNA. In between, or so it appeared to Marcus, flowed a great ocean of idiots, conspiracists, religious lunatics, presumptuous novelists, animal-rights activists, students of politics, and all the other breeds of fundamentalists who professed strange objections to his life’s work. In the past few months, since his FutureMouse had gained some public attention, he had been forced to believe in these people, believe they actually existed en masse, and this was as hard for him as being taken to the bottom of the garden and told that here lived fairies.
‘I mean, they talk about progress,’ said the girl shrilly, becoming somewhat excited. ‘They talk about leaps and bounds in the field of medicine yada yada yada, but bottom line, if somebody knows how to eliminate “undesirable” qualities in people, do you think some government’s not going to do it? I mean, what’s undesirable? There’s just something a little fascist about the whole deal… I guess it’s a good book, but at points you do think: where are we going here? Millions of blonds with blue eyes? Mail order babies? I mean, if you’re Indian like me you’ve got something to worry about, yeah? And then they’re planting cancers in poor creatures; like, who are you to mess with the make-up of a mouse? Actually creating an animal just so it can die – it’s like being God! I mean personally I’m a Hindu, yeah? I’m not religious or nothing, but you know, I believe in the sanctity of life, yeah? And these people, like, program the mouse, plot its every move, yeah, when it’s going to have kids, when it’s going to die. It’s just unnatural.’
Marcus nodded and tried to disguise his exhaustion. It was exhausting just to listen to her. Nowhere in the book did Marcus even touch upon human eugenics – it wasn’t his field, and he had no particular interest in it. And yet this girl had managed to read a book almost entirely concerned with the more prosaic developments in recombinant DNA – gene therapy, proteins to dissolve blood clots, the cloning of insulin – and emerge from it full of the usual neo-fascist tabloid fantasies – mindless human clones, genetic policing of sexual and racial characteristics, mutated diseases, etc. Only the chapter on his mouse could have prompted such an hysterical reaction. It was to his mouse that the title of the book referred (again, the agent’s idea), and it was his mouse upon which media attention had landed. Marcus saw clearly now what he had previously only suspected, that if it were not for the mouse there would have been little interest in the book at all. No other work he had been involved with seemed to catch the public imagination like his mice. To determine a mouse’s future stirred people up. Precisely because people saw it that way: it wasn’t determining the future of a cancer, or a reproductive cycle, or the capacity to age. It was determining the future of the mouse. People focused on the mouse in a manner that never failed to surprise him. They seemed unable to think of the animal as a site, a biological site for experimentation into heredity, into disease, into mortality. The mouseness of the mouse seemed inescapable. A picture from Marcus’s laboratory of one of his transgenic mice, along with an article about the struggle for a patent, had appeared in The Times. Both he and the paper received a ton of hate-mail from factions as disparate as the Conservative Ladies Association, the Anti-Vivisection lobby, the Nation of Islam, the rector of St Agnes’s Church, Berkshire, and the editorial board of the far-left Schnews. Neena Begum phoned to inform him that he would be reincarnated as a cockroach. Glenard Oak, always acute to a turning media tide, retracted their invitation for Marcus to come to school during National Science week. His own son, his Joshua, still refused to speak to him. The insanity of all of it genuinely shook him. The fear he had unwittingly provoked. And all because the public were three steps ahead of him like Oscar’s robot, they had already played out their endgames, already concluded what the result of his research would be – something he did not presume to imagine! – full of their clones, zombies, designer children, gay genes. Of course, he understood the work he did involved some element of moral luck; so it is for all men of science. You work partly in the dark, uncertain of future ramifications, unsure what blackness your name might yet carry, what bodies will be laid at your door. No one working in a new field, doing truly visionary work, can be certain of getting through his century or the next without blood on his palms. But stop the work? Gag Einstein? Tie Heisenberg’s hands? What can you hope to achieve?
‘But surely,’ Marcus began, more rattled than he expected himself to be, ‘surely that’s rather the point. All animals are in a sense programmed to die. It’s perfectly natural. If it appears random, that’s only because we don’t clearly understand it, you see. We don’t properly understand why some people seem predisposed to cancer. We don’t properly understand why some people die of natural causes at sixty-three and some at ninety-seven. Surely it would be interesting to know a little more about these things. Surely the point of something like an oncomouse is that we’re given the opportunity to see a life and a death stage by stage under the micro-’
‘Yeah, well,’ said the girl, putting the book in her bag. ‘What- ever. I’ve got to get to gate 52. It was nice talking to you. But yeah, you should definitely give it a read. I’m a big fan of Surrey T. Banks… he writes some freaky shit.’
Marcus watched the girl and her bouncing ponytail progress down the wide walkway until she merged with other dark-haired girls and was lost. Instantly, he felt relieved and remembered with pleasure his own appointment with gate 32 and Magid Iqbal, who was a different kettle of fish, or a blacker kettle, or whatever the phrase was. With fifteen minutes to spare, he abandoned his coffee which had gone rapidly from scalding to lukewarm, and began to walk in the direction of the lower 50s. The phrase ‘a meeting of minds’ was running through his head. He knew this was an absurd thing to think of a seventeen-year-old boy, but still he thought it, felt it: a certain elation, maybe equal to the feeling his own mentor experienced when the seventeen-year-old Marcus Chalfen first walked into his poky college office. A certain satisfaction. Marcus was familiar with the mutually beneficial smugness that runs from mentor to protégé and back again (ah, but you are brilliant and deign to spend your time with me! Ah, but I am brilliant and catch your attention above all others!). Still, he indulged himself. And he was glad to be meeting Magid for the first time, alone, though he hoped he was not guilty of planning it that way. It was more a series of fortunate accidents. The Iqbals’ car had broken down, and Marcus’s hatchback was not large. He had persuaded Samad and Alsana that there would not be enough room for Magid’s luggage if they came with him. Millat was in Chester with KEVIN and had been quoted as saying (in language reminiscent of his Mafia video days), ‘I have no brother.’ Irie had an exam in the morning. Joshua refused to get in any car if Marcus was in it; in fact, he generally eschewed cars at present, opting for the environmentally ethical option of two wheels. As far as Josh’s decision went, Marcus felt as he did about all human decisions of this kind. One could neither agree nor disagree with them as ideas. There was no rhyme nor reason for so much of what people did. And in his present estrangement from Joshua he felt more powerless than ever. It hurt him that even his own son was not as Chalfenist as he’d hoped. And over the past few months he had built up great expectations of Magid (and this would explain why his pace quickened, gate 28, gate 29, gate 30); maybe he had begun to hope, begun to believe, that Magid would be a beacon for right-thinking Chalfenism even as it died a death here in the wilderness. They would save each other. This couldn’t be faith could it, Marcus? He questioned himself directly on this point as he scurried along. For a gate and a half the question unnerved him. Then it passed and the answer was reassuring. Not faith, no, Marcus, not the kind with no eyes. Something stronger, something firmer. Intellectual faith.
So. Gate 32. It would be just the two of them, then, meeting at last, having conquered the gap between continents; the teacher, the willing pupil, and then that first, historic handshake. Marcus did not think for a second it could or would go badly. He was no student of history (and science had taught him that the past was where we did things through a glass, darkly, whereas the future was always brighter, a place where we did things right or at least right-er), he had no stories to scare him concerning a dark man meeting a white man, both with heavy expectations, but only one with the power. He had brought no piece of white cardboard either, some large banner with a name upon it, like the rest of his fellow waiters, and as he looked around gate 32, that concerned him. How would they know each other? Then he remembered he was meeting a twin, and remembering that made him laugh out loud. It was incredible and sublime, even to him, that a boy should walk out of that tunnel with precisely the same genetic code as a boy he already knew, and yet in every conceivable way be different. He would see him and yet not see him. He would recognize him and yet that recognition would be false. Before he had a chance to think what this meant, whether it meant anything, they were coming towards him, the passengers of BA flight 261; a talkative but exhausted brown mob who rushed towards him like a river, turning off at the last minute as if he were the edge of a waterfall. Nomoskār… sālām ā lekum… kamon āchō? This is what they said to each other and their friends on the other side of the barrier; some women in full purdah, some in saris, men in strange mixtures of fabrics, leather, tweed, wool and nylon, with little boat-hats that reminded Marcus of Nehru; children in jumpers made by the Taiwanese and rucksacks of bright reds and yellows; pushing through the doors to the concourse of gate 32; meeting aunts, meeting drivers, meeting children, meeting officials, meeting sun-tanned white-toothed airline representatives…
‘You are Mr Chalfen.’
Meeting minds. Marcus lifted his head to look at the tall young man standing in front of him. It was Millat’s face, certainly, but it was cleaner cut, and somewhat younger in appearance. The eyes were not so violet, or at least not so violently violet. The hair was floppy in the English public school style and brushed forward. The form was ever so thickly set and healthy. Marcus was no good on clothes, but he could say at least that they were entirely white and that the overall impression was of good materials, well made and soft. And he was handsome, even Marcus could see that. What he lacked in the Byronic charisma of his brother, he seemed to gain in nobility, with a sturdier chin and a dignified jaw. These were all pins in haystacks, however, these were the differences you notice only because the similarity is so striking. They were twins from their broken noses to their huge, ungainly feet. Marcus was conscious of a very faint feeling of disappointment that this was so. But superficial exteriors aside, there was no doubting, Marcus thought, who this boy Magid truly resembled. Hadn’t Magid spotted Marcus from a crowd of many? Hadn’t they recognized each other, just now, at a far deeper, fundamental level? Not twinned like cities or the two halves of a randomly split ovum, but twinned like each side of an equation: logically, essentially, inevitably. As rationalists are wont, Marcus abandoned rationalism for a moment in the face of the sheer wonder of the thing. This instinctive meeting at gate 32 (Magid had strode across the floor and walked directly to him), finding each other like this in a great swell of people, five hundred at least: what were the chances? It seemed as unlikely as the feat of the sperm who conquer the blind passage towards the egg. As magical as that egg splitting in two. Magid and Marcus. Marcus and Magid.
‘Yes! Magid! We finally meet! I feel as if I know you already – well, I do, but then again I don’t – but, bloody hell, how did you know it was me?’
Magid’s face grew radiant and revealed a lopsided smile of much angelic charm. ‘Well, Marcus, my dear man, you are the only white fellow at gate 32.’
The return of Magid Mahfooz Murshed Mubtasim shook the houses of Iqbal, Jones and Chalfen considerably. ‘I don’t recognize him,’ said Alsana to Clara in confidence, after he had spent a few days at home. ‘There is something peculiar about him. When I told him Millat was in Chester, he did not say a word. Just a stiff-upper lip. He hasn’t seen his brother in eight years. But not a little squeak, not a whisperoo. Samad says this is some clone, this is not an Iqbal. One hardly likes to touch him. His teeth, he brushes them six times a day. His underwear, he irons them. It is like sitting down to breakfast with David Niven.’
Joyce and Irie viewed the new arrival with equal suspicion. They had loved the one brother so well and thoroughly for so many years, and now suddenly this new, yet familiar face; like switching on your favourite TV soap only to find a beloved character slyly replaced by another actor with a similar haircut. For the first few weeks they simply did not know what to make of him. As for Samad, if he had had his way, he would have hidden the boy away for ever, locked him under the stairs or sent him to Greenland. He dreaded the inevitable visits of all his relatives (the ones he had boasted to, all the tribes who had worshipped at the altar of the framed photograph) when they caught an eye-load of this Iqbal the younger, with his bow-ties and his Adam Smith and his E. M. bloody Forster and his atheism! The only up-side was the change in Alsana. The A- Z? Yes, Samad Miah, it is in the top right-hand drawer, yes, that’s where it is, yes. The first time she did it, he almost jumped out of his skin. The curse was lifted. No more maybe Samad Miah, no more possibly Samad Miah. Yes, yes, yes. No, no, no. The fundamentals. It was a blessed relief, but it wasn’t enough. His sons had failed him. The pain was excruciating. He shuffled through the restaurant with his eyes to the ground. If aunts and uncles phoned, he deflected questions or simply lied. Millat? He is in Birmingham, working in the mosque, yes, renewing his faith. Magid? Yes, he is marrying soon, yes, a very good young man, wants a lovely Bengali girl, yes, upholder of traditions, yes.
So. First came the musical-living-arrangements, as everybody shifted one place to the right or left. Millat returned at the beginning of October. Thinner, fully bearded and quietly determined not to see his twin on political, religious and personal grounds. ‘If Magid stays,’ said Millat (De Niro, this time), ‘I go.’ And because Millat looked thin and tired and wild-eyed, Samad said Millat could stay, which left no other option but for Magid to stay with the Chalfens (much to Alsana’s chagrin) until the situation could be resolved. Joshua, furious at being displaced in his parents’ affections by yet another Iqbal, went to the Joneses’, while Irie, though ostensibly having returned to her family home (on the concession of a ‘year off’), spent all her time at the Chalfens, organizing Marcus’s affairs so as to earn money for her two bank accounts (Amazon Jungle Summer ’93 and Jamaica 2000), often working deep into the night and sleeping on the couch.
‘The children have left us, they are abroad,’ said Samad over the phone to Archie, in so melancholy a fashion that Archie suspected he was quoting poetry. ‘They are strangers in strange lands.’
‘They’ve run to the bloody hills, more like,’ replied Archie grimly. ‘I tell you, if I had a penny for every time I’ve seen Irie in the past few months…’
He’d have about ten pence. She was never home. Irie was stuck between a rock and a hard place, like Ireland, like Israel, like India. A no-win situation. If she stayed home there was Joshua berating her about her involvement with Marcus’s mice. Arguments she had no answer for, nor any stomach: should living organisms be patented? Is it right to plant pathogens in animals? Irie didn’t know and so, with her father’s instincts, shut her mouth and kept her distance. But if she was at the Chalfens’, working away at what had become a full-time summer job, she had to deal with Magid. Here, the situation was impossible. Her work for Marcus, which had begun nine months earlier as a little light filing, had increased seven fold; the recent interest in Marcus’s work meant she was required to deal with the calls of the media, sackfuls of post, organize appointments; her pay had likewise increased to that of a secretary. But that was the problem, she was a secretary, whereas Magid was a confidant, an apprentice and disciple, accompanying Marcus on trips, observing him in the laboratory. The golden child. The chosen one. Not only was he brilliant, but he was charming. Not only was he charming, but he was generous. For Marcus, he was an answer to prayers. Here was a boy who could weave the most beautiful moral defences with a professionalism that belied his years, who helped Marcus formulate arguments he would not have had the patience to do alone. It was Magid who encouraged him out of the laboratory, taking him by the hand squinting into the sunlit world where people were calling for him. People wanted Marcus and his mouse, and Magid knew how to give it to them. If the New Statesman needed two thousand words on the patent debate, Magid would write while Marcus spoke, translating his words into elegant English, turning the bald statements of a scientist disinterested in moral debates into the polished arguments of a philosopher. If Channel 4 News wanted an interview, Magid explained how to sit, how to move one’s hands, how to incline one’s head. All this from a boy who had spent the greater proportion of his life in the Chittagong Hills, without television or newspaper. Marcus – even though he had a lifelong hatred of the word, even though he hadn’t used it since his own father clipped his ear for it when he was three – was tempted to call it a miracle. Or, at the very least, extremely fortuitous. The boy was changing his life and that was extremely fortuitous. For the first time in his life, Marcus was prepared to concede faults in himself – small ones, mind – but still… faults. He had been too insular, perhaps, perhaps. He had been aggressive towards public interest in his work, perhaps, perhaps. He saw room for change. And the genius of it, the master stroke, was that Magid never for a moment let Marcus feel that Chalfenism was being compromised in any way whatsoever. He expressed his undying affection and admiration for it every day. All Magid wanted to do, he explained to Marcus, was bring Chalfenism to the people. And you had to give the people what they wanted in a form they could understand. There was something so sublime in the way he said it, so soothing, so true, that Marcus, who would have spat on such an argument six months before, gave in without protest.
‘There’s room for one more chap this century,’ Magid told him (this guy was a master in flattery), ‘Freud, Einstein, Crick and Watson… There is an empty seat, Marcus. The bus is not quite full capacity. Ding! Ding! Room for one more…’
And you can’t beat that for an offer. You can’t fight it. Marcus and Magid. Magid and Marcus. Nothing else mattered. The two of them were oblivious to the upset they caused Irie, or to the widespread displacement, the strange seismic ripples, that their friendship had set off in everyone else. Marcus had pulled out, like Mountbatten from India, or a satiated teenage boy from his latest mate. He abrogated responsibility, for everything and everybody – Chalfens, Iqbals and Joneses – everything and everyone bar Magid and his mice. All others were fanatics. And Irie bit her tongue because Magid was good, and Magid was kind, and Magid walked through the house in white. But like all manifestations of the Second Coming, all saints, saviours and gurus, Magid Iqbal was also, in Neena’s eloquent words, a first-class, one hundred per cent, bona fide, total and utter pain in the arse. A typical conversation:
‘Irie, I am confused.’
‘Not right now, Magid, I’m on the phone.’
‘I don’t wish to take from your valuable time, but it is a matter of some urgency. I am confused.’
‘Magid, could you just-’
‘You see. Joyce very kindly bought me these jeans. They are called Levis.’
‘Look, could I call you back? Right… OK… Bye. What, Magid? That was an important call. What is it?’
‘So you see I have these beautiful American Levi jeans, white jeans, that Joyce’s sister brought back from a holiday in Chicago, the Windy City they call it, though I don’t believe there is anything particularly unusual about its climate, considering its proximity to Canada. My Chicago jeans. Such a thoughtful gift! I was overwhelmed to receive them. But then I was confused by this label in the inner lining that states that the jeans are apparently “shrink-to-fit”. I asked myself, what can this mean: “shrink-to-fit”?’
‘They shrink until they fit, Magid. That would be my guess.’
‘But Joyce was percipient enough to buy them in precisely the right size, you see? A 32, 34.’
‘All right, Magid, I don’t want to see them. I believe you. So don’t shrink them.’
‘That was my original conclusion, also. But it appears there is no separate procedure for shrinking them. If one washes the jeans, they will simply shrink.’
‘Fascinating.’
‘And you appreciate at some juncture the jeans will require washing?’
‘What’s your point, Magid.’
‘Well, do they shrink by some pre-calculated amount, and if so, by how much? If the amount was not correct, they would open themselves up to a great deal of litigation, no? It is no good if they shrink-to-fit, after all, if they do not shrink-to-fit me. There is another possibility, as Jack suggested, that they shrink to the contours of the body. Yet how can such a thing be possible?’
‘Well, why don’t you get in the fucking bath with the fucking jeans on and see what happens?’
But you couldn’t upset Magid with words. He turned the other cheek. Sometimes hundreds of times a day, like a lollipop lady on ecstasy. He had this way of smiling at you, neither wounded nor angry, and then inclining his head (to the exact same angle his father did when taking an order of curried prawns) in a gesture of total forgiveness. He had absolute empathy for everybody, Magid. And it was an unbelievable pain in the arse.
‘Umm, I didn’t mean to… Oh shit. Sorry. Look… I don’t know… you’re just so… have you heard from Millat?’
‘My brother shuns me,’ said Magid, that same expression of universal calm and forgiveness unchanged. ‘He marks me like Cain because I am a non-believer. At least not in his god or any others with a name. Because of this, he refuses to meet me, even to talk on the telephone.’
‘Oh, you know, he’ll probably come round. He always was a stubborn bastard.’
‘Of course, yes, you love him,’ continued Magid, not giving Irie a chance to protest. ‘So you know his habits, his manners. You will understand, then, how fiercely he takes my conversion. I have converted to Life. I see his god in the millionth position of pi, in the arguments of the Phaedrus, in a perfect paradox. But that is not enough for Millat.’
Irie looked him square in the face. There was something in there she had been unable to put her finger on these four months, because it was obscured by his youth, his looks, his clean clothes and his personal hygiene. Now she saw it clearly. He was touched by it – the same as Mad Mary, the Indian with the white face and the blue lips, and the guy who carried his wig around on a piece of string. The same as those people who walk the Willesden streets with no intention of buying Black Label beer, or stealing a stereo, collecting the dole or pissing in an alleyway. The ones with a wholly different business. Prophecy. And Magid had it in his face. He wanted to tell you and tell you and tell you.
‘Millat demands complete surrender.’
‘Sounds typical.’
‘He wants me to join Keepers of the Eternal and-’
‘Yeah, KEVIN, I know them. So you have spoken to him.’
‘I don’t need to speak to him to know what he thinks. He is my twin. I don’t wish to see him. I don’t need to. Do you understand the nature of twins? Do you understand the meaning of the word cleave? Or rather, the double meaning that-’
‘Magid. No offence, but I’ve got work to do.’
Magid gave a little bow. ‘Naturally. You will excuse me, I have to go and submit my Chicago jeans to the experiment you proposed.’
Irie gritted her teeth, picked up the phone and redialled the number she had cut off. It was a journalist (it was always journalists these days), and she had something to read to him. She’d had a crash course in media relations since her exams, and dealing with them/it had taught her there was no point in trying to deal with each one separately. To give some unique point of view to the FT and then to the Mirror and then to the Daily Mail was impossible. It was their job, not yours, to get the angle, to write their separate book of the huge media bible. Each to their own. Reporters were factional, fanatical, obsessively defending their own turf, propounding the same thing day after day. So it had always been. Who would have guessed that Luke and John would take such different angles on the scoop of the century, the death of the Lord? It just went to prove that you couldn’t trust these guys. Irie’s job, then, was to give the information as it stood, every time, verbatim from a piece of paper written by Marcus and Magid, stapled to the wall.
‘All right,’ said the journo. ‘Tape’s running.’
And here Irie stumbled at the first hurdle of PR: believing in what you sell. It wasn’t that she lacked the moral faith. It was more fundamental than that. She didn’t believe in it as a physical fact. She didn’t believe it existed. FutureMouse© was now such an enormous, spectacular, cartoon of an idea (in every paper’s column, agonized over by journos – Should it get a patent? Eulogized by hacks – Greatest achievement of the century?), one expected the damn mouse to stand up and speak by itself. Irie took a deep breath. Though she had repeated the words many times, they still seemed fantastical, absurd – fiction on the wings of fantasy – with more of a dash of Surrey T. Banks in them:
PRESS RELEASE: 15 OCTOBER 1992
Subject: Launch of FutureMouse©
Professor Marcus Chalfen, writer, celebrated scientist and leading figure of a group of research geneticists from St Jude’s College, intends to ‘launch’ his latest ‘design’ in a public space; to increase understanding of transgenics and to raise interest and further investment in his work. The design will demonstrate the sophistication of the work being done on gene manipulation and demystify this much maligned branch of biological research. It will be accompanied by a full exhibition, a lecture hall, a multimedia area and interactive games for children. It will be funded in part by the government’s Millennial Science Commission, with additional monies from business and industry.
A two-week-old FutureMouse© is to be put on display at the Perret Institute in London on 31 December 1992. There it will remain on public display until 31 December 1999. This mouse is genetically normal except for a select group of novel genes that are added to the genome. ADNA clone of these genes is injected into the fertilized mouse egg, thus linking them to the chromosomal DNA in the zygote, which is subsequently inherited by cells of the resulting embryo. Before injection into the germ line, these genes are custom-designed so they can be ‘turned on’ and expressed only in specific mouse tissue and along a predictable timetable. The mouse will be the site for an experiment into the ageing of cells, the progression of cancer within cells, and a few other matters that will serve as surprises along the way!
The journalist laughed. ‘Jesus. What the fuck does that mean?’
‘I dunno,’ said Irie. ‘Surprises, I guess.’
She continued:
The mouse will live the seven years it is on display, roughly double the normal life expectancy of a mouse. The mouse development is retarded, therefore, at a ratio of two years for every one. At the end of the first year the SV40 large-T oncogene, which the mouse carries in the insulin-producing pancreas cells, will express itself in pancreatic carcinomas that will continue to develop at a retarded pace throughout its life. At the end of the second year the H-ras oncogene in its skin cells will begin to express itself in multiple benign papillomas that an observer will be able to see clearly three months later with the naked eye. Four years into the experiment the mouse will begin to lose its ability to produce melanin by means of a slow, programmed eradication of the enzyme tyrosinase. At this point the mouse will lose all its pigmentation and become albino: a white mouse. If no external or unexpected interference occurs, the mouse will live until 31 December 1999, dying within the month after that date. The FutureMouse© experiment offers thepublic a unique opportunity to see a life and death in ‘close-up’. The opportunity to witness for themselves a technology that might yet slow the progress of disease, control the process of ageing and eliminate genetic defect. The FutureMouse© holds out the tantalizing promise of a new phase in human history where we are not victims of the random but instead directors and arbitrators of our own fate.
‘Bloody hell,’ said the journo. ‘Scary shit.’
‘Yeah, I guess,’ said Irie vacantly (she had ten more calls to make this morning). ‘Do you want me to post on some of the photographic material?’
‘Yeah, go on. Save me going through the archive. Cheers.’
Just as Irie put down the phone, Joyce flew into the room like a hippy comet, a great stream of black fringed velvet, kaftan and multiple silk scarves.
‘Don’t use the phone! I’ve told you before. We’ve got to keep the phone free. Millat might be trying to ring.’
Four days earlier Millat had missed a psychiatrist’s appointment Joyce had arranged for him. He had not been seen since. Everyone knew he was with KEVIN, and everyone knew he had no intention of ringing Joyce. Everyone except Joyce.
‘It’s simply essential that I talk with him if he rings. We’re so close to a breakthrough. Marjorie’s almost certain it’s Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.’
‘And how come you know all this? I thought Marjorie was a doctor. What the fuck happened to doctor- patient privilege?’
‘Oh, Irie, don’t be silly. She’s a friend too. She’s just trying to keep me informed.’
‘Middle-class mafia, more like.’
‘Oh really. Don’t be so hysterical. You’re getting more hysterical by the day. Look, I need you to keep off the phone.’
‘I know. You said.’
‘Because if Marjorie’s right, and it is ADD, he really needs to get to a doctor and some methylphenidate. It’s a very debilitative condition.’
‘Joyce, he hasn’t got a disorder, he’s just a Muslim. There are one billion of them. They can’t all have ADD.’
Joyce took in a little gasp of air. ‘I think you’re being very cruel. That’s exactly the kind of comment that isn’t helpful.’
She stalked over to the bread board, tearfully cut off a huge lump of cheese and said, ‘Look. The most important thing is that I get the two of them to face each other. It’s time.’
Irie looked dubious. ‘Why is it time?’
Joyce popped the lump of cheese into her mouth. ‘It’s time because they need each other.’
‘But if they don’t want to, they don’t want to.’
‘Sometimes people don’t know what they want. They don’t know what they need. Those boys need each other like…’ Joyce thought for a moment. She was bad with metaphor. In a garden you never planted something where something else was meant to be. ‘They need each other like Laurel and Hardy, like Crick needed Watson-’
‘Like East Pakistan needed West Pakistan.’
‘Well, I don’t think that’s very funny, Irie.’
‘I’m not laughing, Joyce.’
Joyce cut more cheese from the block, tore two hunks of bread from a loaf, and sandwiched the three together.
‘The fact is both these boys have serious emotional problems and it’s not helped by Millat refusing to see Magid. It upsets him so much. They’ve been split by their religions, by their cultures. Can you imagine the trauma?’
Irie wished at that moment she had allowed Magid to tell her to tell her to tell her. She would at least have had information. She would have had something to use against Joyce. Because if you listen to prophets, they give you ammunition. The nature of twins. The millionth position of pi (do infinite numbers have beginnings?). And most of all, the double meaning of the word cleave. Did he know which was worse, which more traumatic: pulling together or tearing apart?
‘Joyce, why don’t you worry about your own family for once? Just for a change. What about Josh? When’s the last time you saw Josh?’
Joyce’s upper lip stiffened. ‘Josh is in Glastonbury.’
‘Right. Glastonbury’s been over two months, Joyce.’
‘He’s doing a little travelling. He said he might.’
‘And who’s he with? You don’t know anything about those people. Why don’t you worry about that for a while, and keep the fuck out of everybody else’s business.’
Joyce didn’t even flinch at this. It is hard to explain just how familiar teenage abuse was to Joyce; she got it so regularly these days from her own children and other people’s that a swear-word or a cruel comment just couldn’t affect her. She simply weeded them out.
‘The reason I don’t worry about Josh, as you well know,’ said Joyce, smiling broadly and speaking in her Chalfen-guide-to-parenting voice, ‘is because he’s just trying to get a little bit of attention. Rather like you are at this moment. It’s perfectly natural for well-educated middle-class children to act up at his age.’ (Unlike many others around this time, Joyce felt no shame about using the term ‘middle class’. In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite and the source of all culture. Where they got this idea, it’s hard to say.) ‘But they soon come back into the fold. I’m perfectly confident about Joshua. He’s just acting up against his father and it will pass. But Magid has some real problems. I’ve been doing my research, Irie. And there are just so many signs. I can read them.’
‘Well, you must be misreading them,’ Irie shot back, because a battle was about to begin, she could sense it. ‘Magid’s fine. I was just talking to him. He’s a Zen master. He’s the most fucking serene individual I ever met in my life. He’s working with Marcus, which is what he wants to do, and he’s happy. How about we all try a policy of non-involvement for once? A little laissez-faire? Magid’s fine.’
‘Irie, darling,’ said Joyce, moving Irie along one chair and positioning herself next to the phone. ‘What you never understand is that people are extreme. It would be wonderful if everyone was like your father, carrying on as normal even if the ceiling’s coming down around his ears. But a lot of people can’t do that. Magid and Millat display extreme behaviour. It’s all very well saying laissez-faire and being terribly clever about it, but the bottom line is Millat’s going to get himself into terrible trouble with these fundamentalist people. Terrible trouble. I hardly sleep for worrying about him. You read about these groups in the news… And it’s putting a terrible mental strain on Magid. Now, am I meant to just sit back and watch them tear themselves apart, just because their parents – no, I will say it, because it’s true – just because their parents don’t seem concerned? I’ve only ever had those boys’ welfare at heart, you of all people should know that. They need help. I just walked past the bathroom and Magid is sitting in the bath with his jeans on. Yes. All right? Now,’ said Joyce, serene as a bovine, ‘I should think I know a traumatized child when I see one.’