Sister: A Novel (24 page)

He’s closed the Venetian blinds against the bright spring sunshine and the sombre lighting seems appropriate for talking about your funeral. Today I will try not to mention my physical infirmities, as I said I have no right to complain, not when your body is broken, beyond repair, buried in the ground.

I tell Mr Wright about your funeral, sticking to facts not feelings.

‘Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, her funeral gave me two important new leads,’ I say, omitting the soul-suffocating torture of watching your coffin being covered with earth. ‘The first was that I understood why Emilio Codi, if he had murdered Tess, would have waited until after Xavier was born.’

Mr Wright doesn’t have a clue where I’m going with this, but I think you do.

‘I’d always known Emilio had a motive,’ I continue. ‘His affair with Tess jeopardised his marriage and his job. True, his wife hadn’t left him when she found out, but he couldn’t have known that. But if it was him, and he killed to protect his marriage and career, why not do it when Tess refused to have an abortion?’

Mr Wright nods, and I think he’s intrigued.

‘I’d also remembered that it was Emilio Codi who had phoned the police after the reconstruction and told them that Tess had already had her baby. It meant, I thought, that he must have either seen her or spoken to her afterwards. Emilio had already made a formal complaint about me to the police, so I had to be careful, make sure he couldn’t tell them I was pestering him. I phoned him and asked if he still wanted his paintings of Tess. He was clearly angry with me, but wanted them all the same.’

Emilio seemed too large for your flat, his masculinity and rage swamping it. He had unwrapped each of the nude paintings - to check I hadn’t damaged them? Applied fig leaves? Or simply to look at your body again? His voice was ugly with anger.

‘There was no need for my wife to know about Tess, the cystic fibrosis, any of it. Now she’s getting herself tested as a carrier of CF and so am I.’

‘That’s sensible of her. But you are clearly a carrier; otherwise Xavier couldn’t have had it. Both parents need to be carriers for a baby to have it.’

‘I know that. The genetic counsellors rammed it into us. But I may not be the father.’

I was stunned by him. He shrugged. ‘She wasn’t hung up about sex. She could easily have had other lovers.’

‘She would have told you. And me. She wasn’t a liar.’

He was silent because he knew it was true.

‘It was you who phoned the police to say she’d had Xavier, wasn’t it?’ I asked.

‘I thought it was the right thing to do.’

I wanted to challenge him. He had never done ‘the right thing’. But that wasn’t why I was questioning him. ‘So she must have told you that Xavier had died?’

He was silent.

‘Was it a phone call or face to face?’

He picked up his paintings of you and turned to leave. But I stood in front of the doorway.

‘She wanted you to own up to Xavier, didn’t she?’

‘You need to get this straight. When she told me she was pregnant I made it
crystal clear
where I stood about the baby. I told her that I wouldn’t help her or the baby in any way. I wasn’t going to be a father to it. And she didn’t make a fuss about that. She even said that the baby would be better off without me.’

‘Yes. But what about when Xavier died?’

He put down the paintings. I thought for a moment he was going to push me out of the way so he could leave. But he made an absurdly theatrical gesture of surrender, ugly in its childishness.

‘You’re right. Hands up. She threatened to expose me.’

‘You mean she wanted you to say that you were Xavier’s father?’

‘Same thing.’

‘Her baby had died. She just wanted his father not to be ashamed of him.’

His hands were still held up, he tensed his fists, and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me. Then he let them drop to his side.

‘It’s that boy you should be questioning, always following her around with that bloody camera of his. He was obsessed with her. And jealous as hell.’

‘I knew that Tess wouldn’t have asked anything from Emilio if Xavier had lived,’ I say. ‘But when Xavier died it would have been intolerable to her for Emilio to deny him then.’

When I had watched Dad at your graveside he had redeemed himself. When it mattered - when your dead body was going into the muddy cold earth - he had stepped up as the man who is your father. You cannot disown a dead child.

Mr Wright waits a moment before asking his next question. ‘Did you believe him about Simon?’

‘I was suspicious of both him and Simon, but I had nothing tangible against either of them; nothing that would challenge the police’s certainty that she committed suicide.’

I have told Mr Wright about my encounter with Emilio as if I were a detective, but the heart of it for me was as your sister. And I must tell him that too, in case it is relevant. It’s embarrassingly exposing, but I can no longer be modest and shy. I must risk what he thinks of me. So I continue.

Emilio was standing at the open front door, anger sweating out of the pores in his face, holding the nude paintings of you.

‘You just don’t get it, do you? It was sex between me and Tess, great sex, but just sex. Tess knew that.’

‘You don’t think that someone as young as Tess may have been looking to you as a father figure?’

It’s what I thought, however many times you denied it.

‘No. I do not think that.’

‘You don’t think that as her own father had left and you were her tutor that she was looking to you for something more than “just sex”?’

‘No. I don’t.’

‘I hope not. She’d have been so let down.’

I was glad I had finally said it to his face.

‘Or maybe she got a kick out of breaking the rules,’ he said. ‘I was out of bounds and maybe she liked that.’ His tone was almost flirtatious. ‘Forbidden fruit is always more erotic, isn’t it?’

I was silent and he moved a little closer. Too close.

‘But you don’t like sex, do you?’

I was silent and he watched me for a reaction, waiting. ‘Tess said you only have sex to pay for the security of a relationship.’

I felt his eyes on mine, spying into me.

‘She said you chose a job that was dull but secure and the same went for your fiancé.’ He was trying to rip away the insulating layers of our sisterhood and still he continued, ‘She said you’d rather be safe than happy.’ He saw that he’d hit his mark and continued to hit it. ‘That you were afraid of life’.

You were right. As you know. Other people may sail through lives of blue seas, with only the occasional squall, but for me life has always been a mountain - sheer-faced and perilous. And, as I think I told you, I had clung on with the footholds and crampons and safety ropes of a safe job and flat and secure relationship.

Emilio was still staring at my face, expecting me to feel betrayed by you and hurt. But instead I was deeply moved. And I felt closer to you. Because you knew me so much better than I’d realised - and still loved me. You were kind enough not to tell me that you knew about my fearfulness, allowing me to keep my Big Sister self-respect. I wish now that I’d told you. And that I knew if I dared look away from my treacherous mountainside, I’d have seen you flying in the sky untrammelled by insecurities and anxieties, no safety ropes tethering you.

And no ropes keeping you safe.

I hope you think I have found a little courage.

15

Mr Wright has listened to my encounter with Emilio and I am trying to detect if he thinks less of me. Mrs Crush Secretary bustles in with coffee for Mr Wright in a china cup, Maryland cookies balanced on the saucer, the chocolate melting onto the white china. I have a polystyrene cup with no biscuits. Mr Wright is a little embarrassed by the favouritism. He waits for her to leave and puts one of his cookies next to my cup.

‘You said the funeral gave you two new leads?’

Lead? Did I really use the word? Sometimes I hear my new vocabulary and for a moment the absurdity of all this threatens to turn my life into farce.

‘It’s Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the candlestick.’

‘Bee, you’re so silly. It’s Professor
Plum
in the
library
with the
rope
!’

Mr Wright is waiting.

‘Yes. The other was Professor Rosen.’

Although most people at your funeral were blurred by grief and rain, I noticed Professor Rosen, maybe because he was a known face from television. He was amongst the crowd who couldn’t fit inside the church, holding an umbrella with vents, a scientist’s umbrella, letting the wind through while other mourners had their umbrellas turned inside out. Afterwards he came up to me and awkwardly stretched out his hand, then let it fall to his side, as if too shy to continue with the gesture. ‘Alfred Rosen. I wanted to apologise to you, for the email that the PR woman sent you. It was callous.’ His glasses were misted up and he used a handkerchief to wipe them clean. ‘I have emailed you my personal contact details, should you want to ask me anything further. I’d be happy to answer any questions that you have.’ His language was starched and his posture tense, I noticed that much, but nothing else because my thoughts were with you.

‘I phoned Professor Rosen on the number he’d given me, about a week after the funeral.’

I gloss over that week of emotional turmoil after your funeral, when I didn’t think straight, couldn’t eat and barely spoke. I continue briskly, trying to blot out the memory of that time.

‘He said he was going away on a lecture tour, and suggested we meet before he left.’

‘Were you suspicious of him?’ asks Mr Wright.

‘No. I had no reason to think either he or the trial were connected to Tess’s death. By then I thought the payments to the women were probably innocent, as the people at the hospital had said, but I hadn’t directly asked him, so I wanted to do that.’

I thought I had to question everything, be suspicious of everyone. I couldn’t afford to go down just one avenue, but had to explore all of them until at the end of one, at the centre of the maze, I would find your killer.

‘Our meeting was at ten o’clock, but Gene-Med run information seminars starting at nine thirty, so I booked a place.’

Mr Wright looks surprised.

‘It’s a bit like the nuclear industry used to be,’ I say. ‘Wanting everything to look open and innocent. “
Visit Sellafield and bring a picnic
!” You know the kind of thing.’

Mr Wright smiles, but the strangest thing has happened. For a moment as I was speaking I heard myself talking like you.

It was the morning rush hour and the tube was packed. As I stood squashed up against other commuters I remembered, appalled, the note I’d put up on the college notice board asking your friends to meet me. In the turmoil after your funeral I’d somehow forgotten. It was at twelve that day. I felt far more apprehensive about that than my meeting with Professor Rosen.

At just before 9.30 a.m. I arrived at the Gene-Med building - ten storeys high in glass with transparent lifts going up the outside like bubbles in sparkling mineral water. Light tubes encircled the building with purple and blue bolts of light shooting around its circumference; ‘science fiction becomes science fact’ seemed to be the message.

The sparkling fantasy image was tarnished by a knot of around ten demonstrators holding placards, one saying ‘NO TO DESIGNER BABIES!’ Another ‘LEAVE PLAYING GOD TO GOD!’ There were no shouts to go with the placards, the demonstrators yawning and lacklustre, as if it was too early to be up and about. I wondered if they were there to get on the telly, although media coverage had tailed off in the last few weeks with the TV using library footage now. Maybe they’d turned out because it was the first day in weeks that wasn’t snowing or sleeting or raining.

As I got nearer I heard one demonstrator, a multi-pierced woman with angrily spiky hair, talking to a journalist.

‘. . . and only the rich will be able to afford the genes to make their children cleverer and more beautiful and more athletic. Only the rich will be able to afford the genes that will stop their children getting cancer or heart disease.’

The journalist was just holding the Dictaphone looking a little bored, but the spiky-haired protester was undaunted and furiously continued. ‘They will eventually create a genetic super-class. And there won’t be any chance of intermarrying. Who’s going to marry someone uglier than they are, and weaker, more stupid and prone to illness? After a few generations they will have created two species of people. A gene-rich and a gene-poor.’

I went up to the spiky-haired demonstrator. ‘Have you ever met someone with cystic fibrosis? Or muscular dystrophy? Or Huntingdon’s disease?’ I asked.

She glared at me, annoyed I’d interrupted her flow.

‘You don’t know what it’s like living with cystic fibrosis, knowing that it’s killing you, drowning in your own phlegm. You don’t know anything about it all, do you?’

She moved away from me.

‘You’re lucky,’ I called after her. ‘Nature made you gene-rich. ’

And then I walked into the building.

I gave my name into a security grill on the door and was buzzed in. I signed my name at reception and presented my passport as I’d been instructed. A camera behind the desk automatically took my photo to make an identity card and then I was allowed through. I’m not sure what they were scanning for, but the machines were far more sophisticated than anything I’d been through at airport security checks. Fifteen of us were then shown into a seminar room, dominated by a large screen, and were welcomed by a young woman called Nancy, our perky ‘facilitator’.

After an elementary lesson in genetics, Perky Nancy showed us a short film of mice that had been injected as embryos with a jellyfish gene. In the film, the lights went off - and hey presto! - the mice glowed green. There were many oohs and aahs, and I noticed that only one other person, a middle-aged man with a grey ponytail, like me, wasn’t entertained.

Perky Nancy played us the next film, which showed mice in a maze. ‘And here’s Einstein and his friends,’ she enthused. ‘These little fellows have an extra copy of a gene that codes for memory, making them much cleverer.’

In the film ‘Einstein and his friends’ were finding their way around a maze at dazzling speed compared with the meanderings of their dimmer, non-genetically engineered friends.

The man with the grey ponytail spoke up, his voice aggressive. ‘Does this “IQ” gene get into the germ line?’ he asked.

Nancy smiled at the rest of us. ‘That means, is the gene passed on to their babies?’ She turned, still smiling, to Ponytail Man. ‘Yes. The original mice were given the genetic enhancement nearly ten years ago now. They were these little fellows’ great, great, great - well I’m running out of greats - grandparents. Seriously, though, this IQ gene has been passed on through many generations.’

Ponytail Man’s posture as well as his tone was belligerent. ‘When will you be testing it on humans? You’ll make a killing then, won’t you?’

Perky Nancy’s expression didn’t flicker. ‘The law doesn’t allow genetic enhancement on people. Only the treating of disease.’

‘But as soon as it’s legal, you’ll be ready and waiting, right?’

‘Scientific endeavour can be purely to forward our knowledge, nothing more sinister or commercial than that,’ responded Perky Nancy. Maybe she had flashcards for this kind of question.

‘You’re floating on the stock market, right?’ he asked.

‘It’s not my job to talk about the financial aspect of the company.’

‘But you have shares? Every employee has shares, right?’

‘As I said—’

He interrupted. ‘So you’d cover up anything that went wrong. Wouldn’t want it to be public?’

Perky Nancy’s tone was sweet but I sensed steel under her linen suit. ‘I can assure you that we are totally open here. And nothing whatsoever has gone “wrong” as you put it.’

She pressed a button and played us the next film footage, which showed mice in a cage with a researcher helpfully putting a ruler in. It was then that you realised their size - not so much by measuring them against the ruler but against the size of the researcher’s hand. They were enormous.

‘We gave these mice a gene to boost muscle growth,’ enthused Perky Nancy. ‘But the gene for that had a surprising effect elsewhere. It made the mice not only much bigger but also meek. We thought we’d get Arnold Schwarzenegger and we ended up with a very muscular Bambi.’

Laughter from the group and again only me and Ponytail Man didn’t join in. As if controlling her own mirth, Perky Nancy continued, ‘There is a serious point to this experiment, though. It shows us that the same gene can code for two totally different and unrelated things.’

It’s what I’d been worried about with you. I hadn’t been such a fusspot after all.

As Perky Nancy led our group out of the seminar room, I saw a security guard talking to grey Ponytail Man. They were arguing but I couldn’t hear what the argument was about; then Ponytail Man was led firmly away.

We walked in the other direction and were escorted into a large room which had been totally devoted to the CF trial. There were photographs of cured babies and newspaper headlines from all over the world. Perky Nancy galloped us through the beginners’ guide to cystic fibrosis as a huge screen behind her showed a child with CF. I noticed the others in our little party gazing at it, but I looked at Perky Nancy, her cheeks pink, her voice trilling with enthusiasm.

‘The story of the cure for cystic fibrosis started in 1989 when an international team of scientists found the defective gene that causes cystic fibrosis. That sounds easy, but remember that in every cell of every human body are forty-six chromosomes and on each chromosome are thirty thousand genes. Finding that one gene was a fantastic achievement. And the search for a cure was on!’

She made it sound like the opening to a
Star Wars
movie, and continued with gusto, ‘Scientists discovered that the defective CF gene was making too much salt and too little water in the cells that line the lungs and the gut, causing sticky mucus to form.’

She turned to the screen, where the child was struggling to breathe, and her voice quavered a little. Maybe it did that every time she showed the film.

‘The problem was how to get a healthy gene into a sufferer’s body,’ she continued. ‘The existing method of using a virus was far from ideal. There were risks associated with it and often it wore off too quickly. Then Professor Rosen, backed by Gene-Med, created an artificial chromosome. It was a new and totally safe way of getting the healthy gene into the body.’