The Swan Song of Doctor Malloy (12 page)

‘The researcher guy, Richard his name is, seemed to know a lot about injecting and stuff and what's being planned. Not a bad pool player either. Maybe you should catch up with him.'

Warren gets out his little black book and scribbles a phone number on a scrap of paper and hands it to me.

‘We deserve some of you, Prof, don't you think?'

I have a sinking feeling that everyone wants a bit of me and there's not much left to go around.

6

Oil leaks, therapists and tulips

It's getting late when I phone the number Warren gave me. To my surprise it's answered. The researcher, Richard Pryce, says he likes working into the night, when all's quiet. We talk a bit about Warren and the poolhall and our shared interests. Richard says how typical it is of university life that we are within spitting distance of each other yet have never met or been linked up. The Drug Indication Project, where he works, turns out to be in the basement of a building a few doors down from my lab.

‘But I suppose lab rats and anthropologists live in different universes,' he adds with a touch of sarcasm.

Walking down the stairs to meet him the next afternoon I'm greeted by a strong smell of cigarette smoke.

‘I heard you coming,' says a young man standing in the open door. ‘I'm Richard, you must be Anthony.' He thrusts out his hand and shakes mine. He's scruffy, from knotted hair to scuffed shoes.

‘Come into the dungeon,' he says, beckoning me into the room. ‘Not much laboratory cleanliness in here I'm afraid.'

And he's not wrong. The room is a mess of files and papers, dirty cups and plates and overflowing ashtrays. He lifts some old newspapers off a chair and gestures for me to sit down. He settles on the other side of the table and takes out a packet of cigarettes.

‘You want one?'

‘Thanks,' I say, taking a cigarette.

He lights mine then his.

‘Well, that's one thing we have in common,' he says, inhaling deeply.

‘And an interest in needles and syringes,' I reply.

‘For sure,' he agrees, stretching back in his chair, one of his long legs reaching up onto the tabletop in front of me. I can smell his socks.

‘Warren says you're a good guy, Anthony.'

‘He says the same about you.'

Just like the shared cigarette, Warren's endorsement is enough to break the ice. Over the next hour Richard tells me about his research into needle sharing among injecting drug users. His original research with the Department of Health was to explore homeless drug users' demand for services. He spent the early months just hanging around Soho talking to people on the streets and gaining their trust. Then about six months ago concern emerged about the link between drug users sharing needles and the spread of HIV.

‘For the first few years we all thought it was a gay disease,' he tells me, the ash from his fourth cigarette settling in a fold in his jumper. ‘But then stories came through of people showing up as HIV positive who weren't gay but who injected drugs.'

‘Here?' I ask.

‘Yes, in London, but also all over the world. The USA, Australia, Holland. The Junkiebond in Amsterdam are handing out needles, and the Aussies are planning to do the same.'

The room is getting dark. Richard flicks on a light and offers me another cigarette.

‘So the Department asked me to change my research questions and find out from drug users about injecting practices. Where they get their needles. When they share. Why they share. So, overnight I'm the expert, because I'm the one who can talk to the guys on the street.'

‘And all the while I'm next door with my head in a test tube.'

‘Each to their own,' he replies with the smugness of the streetwise.

As the evening sets in he talks me through what he has found. Most of it comes straight from his head, as if all the interviews and observations are stored away in a mind-map that defies the chaos of the room. His key conclusion is that drug injecting is a major risk for the spread of HIV infection. No matter how good the education messages, how aware the drug user is of danger, certain situations arise when everything else takes second place to getting the drugs. If it's no hit or sharing a needle, time after time they tell you they'll take the chance.

‘Especially if they're withdrawing or just out of prison,' he adds, ‘or in a strange place where they've just scored and need to get a quick hit in case the police are around.'

I think about the guys from the poolhall with their safe haven under threat.

‘But who cares about them?' asks Richard, clearly passionate about his topic. ‘To the public they're disposable. Debris. Listen to this,' he says, picking up a sheet of paper from his desk. ‘This is the letter I've written to the paper. I'm going to send it in tomorrow …
We demand needle exchange programs. Drug injectors are criminalised because of their actions. They are marginalised from society, shooting up drugs in abandoned buildings and alleyways in cities and towns on every continent. The last chain, the bottom rung, in a four hundred billion dollar a year drugs industry. An international industry in drug production that is nearly ten per cent of international trade, bigger than the combined markets in iron, steel and motorcars, eight times the international development budget, all in illicit drugs. But HIV is a public health issue and whatever you might think about drug use we must provide the technology, the clean needles and syringes, to avert disaster. We demand the Government pilots needle syringe programs, and once they are shown to work, as we are certain they will, we must expand them as quickly as possible. Lives are at stake. All our lives …
What do you think?'

‘It's a great message,' I say, unsure as to exactly what I'm letting myself in for.

Right on cue Richard stands up and puts out his hand to me.

‘We need you, Anthony. We need your invention.'

Walking up from the basement to street level, I pause to catch my breath. The chain-smoking and the weight of expectation have taken a toll. Under my arm I have a folder of draft research papers and reports with all the information Richard could muster. Warren's words ‘What about us?' rumble through my mind as I watch a group of students pile into a pub across the road. They laugh and jostle each other, not a care in the world. I look at the note Richard scribbled on the folder when I told him I was off on a trip overseas to source materials for my syringe. The note reads: ‘CHICAGO: BILLY PRISS: AIDS OUTREACH PROGRAMS!!!' This, said Richard, was to remind me to convince Dr Foster of the value of a detour to Illinois to announce my wonder invention and to plant the seeds of syringe exchange in the US. ‘Tell her,' he said, a clear dose of cynicism in his words, ‘if you get in early the whole US market could be at your feet.' His own agenda was for me to join the fight against the US Federal Government's opposition to providing clean needles to drug users. ‘You'll have all the evidence you need right here,' he'd added when handing me the folder.

‘What about us?' comes again the voice of Warren as I trudge along the road to the lab.

Professor Blake stops sucking on his pipe and taps its contents into the bin below his desk. He turns on the fan and opens the window in an attempt to disperse the smell. There is a ban on smoking in the building, but everyone knows Blake ignores it. Once the smoke settles he tries to create some sense of order before his next appointment. Grant proposals and letters spill off his desk as if reaching out to the teetering towers of reports and half-written articles stacked in piles on the floor. In his vain attempts to tidy the piles (a literal shuffling of paper, by any other name), he merely adds to the confusion, nearly falling from his chair while trying to save the landslide cascading from the end of his desk. This is how his secretary finds him, arms outstretched from desk to floor, as if being crucified on the cross of academia.

Peter is always glad to see me. We have always been good friends. Long before I joined his lab we knew each other on the international conference circuit. Ever since the promising work on the one-use syringe design his office door has always been open. It was he who offered me the lab space, suggesting I try to solve my marital problems by relocating from Melbourne to London. He had his initial doubts about my work, a certain lack of confidence in the project. But he encouraged me all the same, and now it seems its patenting and marketing might save the laboratory from the threat of closure. A threat unthinkable in the halcyon days of Blake's pioneering work on hepatitis delta. Before, that is, the Montreal conference and the Dutch scientists who pipped him at the post of virology and got their results published first. A bit like arriving at Everest to see a flag already flying at the peak. Even then Blake was drinking too much. I should know: it was me who encouraged him to find the solution in a glass. But then there was always his wife's illness to blame for everything that did (or didn't) happen in his life.

Once, in a bar, long after the news arrived that the Dutch drug trials proved conclusively that their vaccine was effective, he poured his heart out to me, after having already poured the best part of a bottle of gin down his throat. His drinking was taking off alarmingly; even I had noticed. He was at that place where one drink was never enough and twenty too few. Where one day he would be drunk on a glass of beer; stone-cold sober after a pint of vodka the next. I knew that place right enough. I was there with him all along. Addicts seek out sordid places and like-minded company.

‘You know,' he said that night, defeat and dismay in his voice, ‘that was my big chance. The scientist's dream: to leave a mark, to be written into the text books. But Irene took away those precious days I needed to get the work done.'

That time, in the bar across the road, I made all the right noises. I told Blake how valued he was, how his work was major and his contribution to his colleagues and students immense. All this was true, but he was a hollowed-out man, filling the vacuum with alcohol. He was well on the way to a special place for wallowing, where the colour of petals hid under a layer of dust. His face was red from drink and the sweat was bubbling on his brow.

Peter was a man unused to failure, but his marriage was turning into a personal nightmare. Ever since Irene had discovered his affair with Fiona, a young research assistant, she'd retreated into her neuroses. In the most crucial months of Blake's work on hepatitis, as he was nearing his goal, his wife called him daily and cried into the phone. Pleading with him to come home, threatening overdoses and carnage. Some days she arrived at the laboratory early in the morning with her pet dog, saying it was sick and needed to be taken to the vet. Other times, she called his secretary to say a water pipe had burst, or there was a gas leak, and he must return home immediately. Or else she phoned to say a strange man was waiting in their driveway and she was worried and needed him urgently. For months they tried to make sense of it together. Peter would leave his work and sit for hours with Irene, stroking her hair, saying again and again he was sorry, telling her time would heal, sobbing beside her as the day faded and the night set in.

Sedation, psychoanalysis, health farms and retreats ensued, but nothing shifted the despair rooted in Irene Blake's heart. The domestic bliss allowing Professor Blake to pursue his relentless and time-consuming drive for acclaim was shot through. All for lust. A rattle amongst the test tubes. A very human and irrational act from a very rational scientist.

We had much in common, Blake and me. Crumbling marriages and an endless capacity to drown it all in alcohol. Back then I thought the main difference was I had it all under control and my imminent success would keep my head above water.

‘Dr Malloy is waiting,' says Jean, Professor Blake's secretary, placing his early-morning coffee on his desk.

‘Ask him in, Jean,' replies Blake, grabbing a pile of correspondence from his desk, looking busy, but not looking up.

‘Here's the syringe file. Oh, and Mrs Blake called,' she says nonchalantly, turning to leave the room. ‘Your wife wanted you to know the washing machine is leaking oil and would you call her.'

Blake's grip tightens on the armrest of his chair, ‘Thank you, Jean, thanks.'

The syringe file, thinks the professor, focusing. So Anthony will make a name for himself. Good for him. No one has beaten him to the tape. No article in the
New England Journal of Innovation
to take the wind out of his sails.

I enter Blake's office. I am uncharacteristically unshaven and I know there are shadows etched under my eyes.

‘Been burning that midnight oil again, Anthony?' asks Blake, as I ease myself into the visitor's chair.

‘Planning the trip, Peter. Trying to fit the itinerary together. Sorting out my teaching commitments, all those kinds of details. Assuming, of course, you're happy for me to take the time out to follow this up.'

I add this caveat, knowing no university department would turn down such an opportunity for prestige, recognition and money.

‘Of course, of course, you have all our backing,' says Blake, pulling the memo from the file. This could be the saving of his bacon, he is well aware. He had read the letter outlining the Taneffe corporation's sponsorship deal the evening after Irene's most recent hospital admission for bulimia. She had gotten into the habit of bingeing on pasta and bread. On nights when Blake was out she would watch TV and eat tubs of ice-cream, a whole Black Forest gateau, and family-sized chocolate bars. The evening consisted of eating and vomiting in equal measure. Things were so bad her teeth were rotting from the onslaught of bile and her stomach was bleeding. When Irene was rushed to hospital with severe haemorrhaging, she weighed no more than six and a half stone.

‘Are you alright, Peter? You look very pale.'

It seems neither of us are in the pink of mental or emotional health this day. I'd gone to sleep with images of a manacled Caitlin.