Ashok says, ‘Shit.’
Stephanie has been very quiet. Now she sends me a look, and makes the small distinctive head movement – a raising of the chin, a widening of the eyes – which I have come to recognise as her version of a silent command.
But I don’t respond.
‘Hesketh,’ she says evenly, ‘I think this might be the moment to tell them what you’ve been holding back.’ I reach for a sheet of paper. I feel ambushed. But I can’t lie. Nor can I even try. Stephanie is still looking at me.
‘What’s going on here?’ says Ashok. ‘If this is some personal bullshit between you two over Kaitlin—’
‘No,’ says Stephanie. ‘It’s not personal, Ashok.’
Professor Whybray says, ‘Is there something bothering you, Hesketh?’
I start folding. A cockroach. Their wings are elaborate. I say, ‘The facts. The facts are bothering me.’
‘Go on,’ urges Stephanie. Her eyes are glittering. ‘Tell them. Tell them now.’
I stand up, take off my jacket and roll up my sleeve to reveal the bruise. It’s finally beginning to fade but the finger-marks remain distinct.
Professor Whybray says ‘May I?’ I go over to him and he inspects it with interest. ‘I presume this was Freddy.’
‘No. It was Jonas Svensson. In Sweden.’
‘Hmmm. He must have had very small hands.’
‘No. That’s the point. He was big. But when he grabbed me, this is the bruising he left.’
I go back and sit down again and continue the cockroach and wait. Nobody says anything for a while. Then finally Stephanie clears her throat. ‘Hesketh also saw something in Dubai that you should know about.’
I give the short version.
‘So I and twenty-seven other men saw the figure that de Vries called a
tokoloshi
,’ I finish. I’m aware of them looking at me. The silence lasts long enough for me to complete the cockroach.
Professor Whybray shifts painfully in his chair, then rises and goes over to the window. The silence continues as he stands there staring out at the cumulus of smoke on the horizon.
Ashok has had his head in his hands, but finally he looks up and says, ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell us this before?’
‘Because you very specifically said,
no little people.
’ Ashok lets a rush of air out of his nose and drums his fingers on the table in a way that indicates aggressiveness. He can’t deny it. ‘But Jonas made the bruises on my arm and I saw a little girl.’
He chucks a water-bomb up into the air. It lands on the desk, then bounces off on to the floor by my feet. I pick it up and cup it in my palm. It’s an admirable specimen.
Professor Whybray turns. His face is very pale. He looks old.
‘Hesketh. If it came from anyone but you, I’d be sceptical. But I can’t doubt that you saw what you saw.’ I shut my eyes and mentally send my little cockroach fluttering up to the ceiling. ‘People with your kind of wiring don’t lie.’ He eases himself back into his chair, apparently in pain. The skin of his face resembles ancient papyrus. I am sure he is not sleeping properly. ‘You should have told us earlier, that’s all. We’ll have to work out what impact this has on our other findings.’
‘It’ll be a very unscientific one,’ I say. ‘Because it appears to make no sense.’
He looks up. ‘New parameters,’ he says bluntly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘He means blue skies. Out of the box,’ says Ashok. ‘As if this whole goddam thing isn’t. Right?’
The professor nods. ‘So to begin with, let’s hypothesise that we’re looking at a generation whose DNA has been somehow altered.’
‘By what? And when? It can’t change once you’re born.’
‘Not yet it can’t,’ he says.
‘What do you mean?’ asks Stephanie.
Ashok says, ‘Are we talking about genetic engineering here or what?’
Stephanie says, ‘Or evolution. But mutation takes centuries.’
‘No. D’you hear about those worms they’ve found thriving in old arsenic mines?’ asks Ashok. ‘Took them just fifty years to adapt to eating one of the world’s most vicious poisons. Or the Nepalese. Extra blood vessels, so they don’t get altitude sickness. A survival mutation.’
I say, ‘And according to our renal expert, congenital kidney abnormalities are already occurring regularly in some parts of the world.’
‘Which means that theoretically in a couple of hundred years’ time it could be the norm,’ says Professor Whybray. His eyes are shining oddly. As if he has a fever.
‘Stop,’ I say. ‘This is now. This is the world we’re in. We’re not talking about some . . . future scenario.’
‘So the idea of a hypothetical world paying us a visit would be philosophically interesting, but quite irrational, according to you, Hesketh?’
I nod. ‘Completely and utterly.’ I wonder why he even needs to ask.
‘So you see no room for metaphysics?’
‘If there’s rationalism and scientifically verifiable data involved, I see room for everything and anything. But if it’s just fanciful speculation, I don’t.’
‘Even after our discussion about CERN?’
‘Whoa there,’ says Ashok. ‘You’re losing me, guys. Why are we even discussing this, this . . . what is it anyway?’
‘A theoretical eventuality,’ says Professor Whybray. ‘Involving a paradigm shift.’
‘Bring it on,’ says Stephanie. Her face is pale and grim. ‘If this paradigm shift involves waking up tomorrow morning and finding out it’s all been a bad dream, I’m in favour.’ Her phone rings. ‘Excuse me a moment.’ She pulls out her mobile, gets up and walks towards the door and faces the wall for privacy.
‘Well I suggest we drop the blue-skies stuff and stick to the facts,’ mutters Ashok. ‘Now who’s for a drink? I sure as hell need one. I’ve got vodka or whisky. Any takers?’
But Professor Whybray isn’t listening: he has perched his notebook on his knee and started writing very fast. So I tell Ashok we’ll both have whisky and watch the old man write. He doesn’t do diagrams: instead, he sets out his ideas in the form of sentences, paragraphs, headings and lists of questions. Often, they are very elegantly phrased. I am a diagram-and-symbol man. But what diagram, and what symbols, can describe a breed of vengeful human child that brings the world as we know it to its knees?
I must’ve swallowed one
, said Jonas Svensson.
You can’t come in
, said de Vries.
Complex organisms like tapeworms can live inside the body for decades. They make huge demands. They are in control. Like puppet masters, they call the shots. The host and the parasite become inseparable. They form a ‘we’.
‘Human history is a juggernaut,’ murmurs the professor. Ashok shoots me a questioning look. I take a deep swig of whisky. A light rain starts falling in wires of silver outside as my mentor’s pen travels across the page, line after line. I fold more paper. Another water-bomb for Ashok. I chuck it over to him and he catches it in one hand. Stephanie’s conversation hasn’t lasted long: she has already said ‘thank you’, sat down again and put the phone back in her handbag. But her movements are a little clumsy.
‘Drink, Steph?’ asks Ashok.
By way of an answer she stands up very suddenly, then staggers and sinks to her knees. Her face is not its usual shape. Professor Whybray drops his notebook, jumps up and grabs her under the arms, just as she’s about to collapse against the desk. He settles her back in her chair and forces her head between her knees.
‘Deep breaths,’ he says, a finger on her pulse. ‘That’s good. That’s good.’
Stephanie groans. It has all happened so quickly I can barely take it in. Ashok is staring wide-eyed. ‘Oh boy,’ he says. ‘Oh Jesus. Oh no.’
I can be slow on the uptake.
It will take some time, therefore, for me to register the news that at 3.15pm the female patient in Bed 67 of the Brown Ward on the fifth floor of St Thomas’ hospital suffered a catastrophic brain haemorrhage, and that due to severe staff shortages, lack of resources and patient overload, no medical staff were able to apply the necessary procedures, and that very regrettably, therefore, the thirty-seven-year-old patient Kaitlin Kalifakidis, mother of one, tragically expired.
Kaitlin Kalifakidis is dead, Kaitlin Kalifakidis is dead, Kaitlin Kalifakidis is dead.
When I told Freddy, he just nodded. That was three days ago. Since then he has asked no questions. I haven’t pursued it. He has approximately 90 per cent of his life ahead of him. I may have 60 per cent of mine. One day, perhaps, it will sink in for both of us.
But not today.
I have seen nothing of Stephanie since she received the call. She went straight from Phipps & Wexman to the hospital, then to her sister’s. When I spoke to this sister to discuss the funeral arrangements, she did not sound like the happy person conjured by her name, Felicity. Felicity described Stephanie as being ‘utterly distraught’. She also conveyed Stephanie’s hope that attending his mother’s funeral might ‘bring it home’ to Freddy.
I consider this to be highly unlikely.
In my workroom, I locate the box that contains my origami supplies. I find the Kawasaki rose in an envelope marked HL. I knew she wouldn’t throw it away. She knew how hard it was to make. How much pre-creasing was involved, how much crimping, how many mountain, valley, squash, reverse and petal folds. It has faded a little. But it is still viable, and a thing of beauty.
It’s mid-morning on Wednesday 3rd October. The cemetery is in Wimbledon. The pony-tailed Flynn drives Freddy, me and Naomi there in a six-seater. Professor Whybray pulled some strings to book Kaitlin’s family an early funeral slot. Care Unit children are only allowed in public places with official Home Office authorisation – this the professor has also seen to – and must be accompanied by three adult minders. Naomi looks beautiful in a cream silk shirt and black skirt. Freddy is in a black school tracksuit which was all I could find that seemed suitable: his red uniform would arouse too much attention. He’s curled up on the back seat, quietly clicking and humming to himself. Since I don’t have a dark jacket with me, I have borrowed one from Professor Whybray. But I don’t feel at home in it because it’s too short, and tight across my shoulders. For this and other more obvious reasons, I feel
mal dans ma peau
.
We drive through largely empty streets, the surreal quiet broken occasionally by the wail of a siren. There are no traffic lights working. In Wandsworth we are forced into a wide detour: a burst water main has turned a whole section of road into a lake. It’s dotted with half-submerged black rubbish bags. Clouds of flies vibrate above them. The smell in this sector is overpowering. Freddy is blank-faced in the back seat.
The cemetery spreads across a couple of acres, a dusty, layered oasis in an urban hinterland of warehouses, high-rise tenements and 1980s retail parks. Subsidence has skewed the gravestones so that barely any stand at right angles. Some are deeply sunk, as though into quicksand. At one end, a piebald horse stands tethered to the gate, grazing on the dry grass that’s worn away in patches, like old carpeting. The car park – crazed tarmac with worn space-markings and weeds soaring through cracks – is ringed by straggling woodland and rhododendron bushes. From here there’s a path into the centre of the cemetery, through an alleyway of desiccated beech trees. On one side there’s a drop to a railway line. A train rumbles past, a flash of blue and red behind the tall banks of Japanese knotweed and rosebay willowherb. Flynn locks the car and we stand for a moment, recalibrating.
Ashok and Stephanie are already waiting in the car park, where the mourners of an earlier funeral are preparing to leave. An older and even paler version of Stephanie is with them: she introduces herself as Stephanie’s sister Felicity. I guess that since she organised this event, she is in charge of the flowers, so I hand her the Kawasaki rose and tell her it’s for the coffin. She accepts it distractedly. Stephanie doesn’t acknowledge Freddy. Nor will she look at him. This doesn’t seem to bother him. Ashok, in dark pinstripe, says, ‘Hi kiddo’, but he keeps his distance and offers none of the hair-ruffling, shoulder-punching or high-fiving with which he’s greeted Freddy in the past. He looks exhausted and tense and his skin has the yellowed tinge of a fading Polaroid snap.
‘The others are over there,’ says Stephanie, pointing. ‘But keep Freddy right away from us, if you don’t mind.’ She points out a straggle of black-clad figures heading towards a low red-brick building that must be the chapel. The women tread carefully on the uneven paving stones. The building is very small in relation to the cemetery, and unambitious in its construction: it could be one of Freddy’s Lego models, scaled up.
I am not good with faces. I didn’t meet Kaitlin’s family that often, and I haven’t seen her brother Alex in a year. He never liked me. Their mother is still in the hospice. Stephanie has told me they took a joint decision not to tell her about Kaitlin’s death.
Without warning, Stephanie starts crying, and Felicity embraces her tightly. Naomi addresses me and Flynn. ‘Bring Freddy in once the service has started. I’ll go with Steph.’
‘I’ll join you,’ says Ashok.