Hypocrite's Isle (16 page)

‘I haven’t quite decided,’ replied Caroline thoughtfully. She took up stance beside him, also staring straight ahead. ‘I suppose for you that was really quite restrained … but you were rude and Marcus is a friend.’

‘I was jealous,’ confessed Gavin.

‘I know you were. That’s why I’m going to let you off, but be warned, I don’t want to end up friendless. They may be idiots in your book but they’re
my
idiots and I like them. They may have had an easier start in life than you, but now you’ve joined them on equal terms. We’re all privileged here and working-class resentment can be very boring, especially when there’s no call for it.’

‘Yes, Ma’am.’

Caroline looked at Gavin out of the corner of her eye.

‘Time to go?’

‘I think so.’

 

Gavin’s cells were alive. The discovery, made on the morning of 3 January, left him staring over the top of the microscope at the rain on the lab windows. Something had changed in the experimental conditions that had allowed the tumour cells to survive in the
presence
of Valdevan, when in the past, they had always died.

‘Shit,’ he murmured as he leaned back in his swivel chair and crossed his arms. The change in culture medium must hold the key, but he still couldn’t see how and he was rapidly running out of time. Such a pity, because he must be so close to unravelling a mystery that had persisted for twenty years. Understanding the nature of a problem was always the first step on the road to solving it and if – and he realised it was a big if – he could explain the changing behaviour of the drug, the end result might well be what the pharmaceutical company had hoped for all those years ago: a drug that specifically attacked cancer cells – the stuff that dreams were made of.

The phone rang and brought him out of his reverie. It was Caroline.

‘Well, what happened?’

‘They survived.’

‘Damn, so it wasn’t a low drug concentration after all?’

‘Nope.’

‘Is that good or bad?’

‘I think it’s good, and I feel I’m really close to understanding what’s going on, but I need a bit more time and that’s the one thing I haven’t got.’

‘It’ll probably come to you in the bath and you can run stark naked up and down Dundas Street shouting eureka!’

‘If it doesn’t, I’ve got months of bloody biochemistry to look forward to. It’s so frustrating. I know I’m that close, and if I can just come up with the reason … this could be really big.’

‘You could try talking to Frank?’

‘I think I’ve pushed my luck as far as it’ll go.’

‘It’s still worth a try.’

‘I’ll think about it. Are you going home this weekend?’

‘It’ll be my last chance before the new term starts. What’ll you do?’

‘Hit the library and think. Could be my last chance too.’

 

The Sunday before the start of term had a depressing feel to it. Christmas, with its overtones of warmth and light, imagined
stagecoaches
and equally imaginary snow, seemed such a long way away, as did New Year with its alcohol-fuelled bonhomie and false
promises
of new beginnings. What was left was reality, a wet Sunday in January and a biting east wind. But however unpleasant the
weather
, Gavin felt he had to get out. He had spent nearly every
waking
hour of the weekend in the medical library, reading up on the kinetics of tumour cell growth – a task made even more unpleasant by the fact that the heating in the library, like all the other
university
buildings, had been turned off until the start of term. He had learned a lot about cell growth, but nothing that had shed any light on the Valdevan problem.

Now, clad in lightweight waterproof overtrousers and a hooded top, he set out to walk along the banks of the Union Canal. He wanted nothing but the sky above him and the smell of wet winter grass in his nostrils.

He started at the canal basin at Lochrin where in a different century, according to the tourist info he’d read, horse-drawn barges had come into the heart of the city from the west along a route excavated by mainly Irish labourers. Among them had been Burke and Hare, the infamous body-snatchers who had once supplied Professor Robert Knox and the university’s anatomy department with cadavers taken from fresh graves under cover of darkness, but later, as demand outgrew supply, with the corpses of those they had murdered to keep up the supply.

Gavin found himself enjoying the walk. The bad weather had kept Sunday strollers, joggers and lycra-clad cyclists at home, and apart from the occasional intrepid dog walker, he met no one along the way. The going was easy as the Union Canal followed a contour line without the need for locks and level changes, and the wind coming from behind kept his hood up without the need to struggle with cords and toggles. There was even a lightness in his step as he thought about Caroline and how their relationship had grown.

He still couldn’t believe his luck. Despite what she said about their priorities being to get their degrees, he was convinced that Caroline was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. They would be happy and successful and have lots of children. He’d take them on long walks and play games with them – not the ones he’d played in Liverpool’s back streets, but proper childhood games like the ones in all the nice story books … like the one with sticks, he thought, as he came to a bridge over the canal at Redhall … Poohsticks, that was it.

Looking round to make sure he was alone, he decided to give it a go. He gathered some twigs from below the hedges at the side of the towpath and snapped them into little bunches before climbing up the muddy path and on to the bridge. He recognised that this game really required a flowing river, but a canal with a wind on it would have to do. He dropped the first group of four into the water on the windward side and then moved over to the other parapet to await their reappearance.

It took some time, but when the biggest one bobbed into view in the lead, he felt such a sense of achievement at having played Poohsticks for the very first time in his life. After a third race he broke out in a broad smile when he thought what he’d be telling Caroline later when she asked what he’d been doing. He left the towpath where it came close to the road at Sighthill and caught a bus back to town.

Gavin couldn’t sleep. His mind was like a busy road junction, only it was information that was the problem, not traffic. A jumble of images and data about tumour cell growth and regulation – much of which he had absorbed at the library over the past few days – was vying for his attention. He had learned a lot in a short time, but the difficulty came in trying to put it into any structured form. He didn’t know the nature of the problem so he couldn’t decide which bits were relevant or which were not. There was no way round this.

He threw his head from side to side on the pillow, trying to escape the images and find peace of mind, but without success. Poohsticks floated into the troubled mix to drift with the cells that floated before his eyes in a race from one side of a microscope slide to the other. The biggest Poohstick always won, followed by the biggest cell, and then the race started all over again.

In his fitful state, Gavin construed this as survival of the fittest – the fastest and strongest winning – before having to concede that Poohsticks were inanimate: Darwinian rules didn’t apply. He didn’t know much about sailing, which was about as foreign to back-street Liverpool as three-day eventing, but did seem to recall hearing once that the longer the hull of a boat the faster it would go through the water. He pondered this, before wondering why on earth he was thinking about hydrodynamics in the small hours of this or any other morning. But as soon as he closed his eyes, the cells swam back into view, the big ones nudging the small out of the way – the fastest, the strongest, the fittest … That was it!

Gavin sat bolt upright in bed as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. The eureka moment had arrived. Cell
growth rate
was the key to the whole puzzle. When he’d been forced to change the cell
culture
medium, he’d made up one that wasn’t as rich as the original: it hadn’t contained human serum. The cells would therefore have grown more slowly. There was a direct relationship between cell growth rate and size – the slower they grew, the smaller they’d be.

Cells growing in the poorer medium had shown the membrane blips associated with Valdevan. They’d been damaged, but they had survived because they were smaller and therefore … more stable. It was as simple as that. He had the key to the riddle. Cells growing in a rich medium would be bigger, so, when Valdevan damaged their membranes, they became unstable and burst. Tumour cells grew slowly in the body compared to cells growing in the lab, so they would be smaller and therefore remain stable too. It all made sense.

The bottom line was that Valdevan didn’t kill cells at all; it caused membrane changes which slow-growing cells could
accommodate
but fast-growing cells could not. This was why it killed cells in the lab but not the body. The S16 gene was not essential: it was a stability problem associated with size that caused cell death.

Gavin turned on the bedside light as everything became
beautifully
clear. As Trish in the tissue culture lab had pointed out, everyone wanted their cells to grow as fast as possible because they were anxious to get results. The same would have been true for the scientists at Grumman Schalk. They would have used the best culture medium available. If they had tested their drug on slow-growing cells they would have got a completely different result, and possibly saved themselves twenty million dollars.

Gavin wanted to call Caroline and tell her about his discovery, but realised as he picked up his mobile that waking her at three in the morning to tell her why Valdevan hadn’t worked might not be such a good idea, particularly as it would involve a short introductory lecture on cell growth and division kinetics before he could deliver the punch line. He got out of bed and shivered as he turned on the fire. He had to write all this down, just in case it still had elements of a dream about it which might not transfer to conscious memory.

 

On the first Monday morning of the new term, Frank Simmons drove to the medical school feeling relieved that the long break was over. It had been nice to spend time with his family and enjoy his kids’ delight at Christmas, but always at the back of his mind was the thought that the research effort had stopped. Now, things could get back to normal. He found people gathered in the corridors, standing in small groups, telling tales of what they’d been doing over the break and exchanging New Year greetings. Cheek-kissing and handshakes were the order of the day. He opened the door of the lab and was surprised to find Gavin there.

Gavin got up, shook hands with him and wished him a happy new year before asking, ‘Can we talk?’

Simmons was a little taken aback at the sudden end to small talk. ‘Sure,’ he agreed. ‘Just let me get my coat off …’ He shrugged off his overcoat and hung it on a hook behind his office door before settling in behind the desk. He crumpled up an old desk calendar and threw it in the bucket. ‘Out with the old, eh? What’s on your mind?’