George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt (20 page)

‘She’s at home now, she’s done so well. And she’s not the only patient. There’s José too.’ He came over to her at the central table and her unease at his excitement made her move away from him a little, but he didn’t appear to notice.

‘José? Who’s he?’ she said quickly.

‘A Spanish chap. People here can’t pronounce his name
properly, so they call him Josey. He was referred to me by his GP, in a dreadful state. Paralysis had started with his feet and the lower part of his legs, and he was sent here via A & E. By the time I got to him the paralysis was spreading fast. I had him on a respirator eventually, desperately ill. As far as I could see, he was going to die in a matter of days. So —’

‘What was the diagnosis?’ She said it almost in desperation; she was now on the other side of the table, moving in as casual a manner as possible, but he was following her.

‘Mmm? Oh, motor-neurone, of course. Anyway, I thought, it’s the last chance he’s got and it was worth it. Even if I couldn’t explain to him properly — his English and my Spanish, you know? But it worked. He’s back at his own work, even. He’s a barman in a West End hotel.’

He was standing right beside her now and she couldn’t move away again, not without taking them both into an absurd ring-a-roses round the table, so she squared her shoulders and said briskly, ‘Well, that’s fine. What now? Didn’t you say there were papers to look at too?’

‘God, I’m grateful to you, George,’ he said and his voice seemed rather thick now. He put both hands on her arms and pulled her closer. ‘I just don’t know how to tell you how much help you’ve been. You’ve made me believe I really can persuade those bastards to fund me and —’

‘Well, that’s great,’ she said, stepping sideways in as offhand a manner as possible. ‘It was my pleasure. Just make sure you invite me to Stockholm when you get your Nobel’ She tried to make it sound funny but it came out strained.

He laughed and to her relief made no further effort to get close. ‘The hell with Nobel. That’d be nice, no doubt, but this could make a fortune for me. Don’t you see that? If I can go on from here with the right funding, then I’ve got one of the biggest pharmaceutical breakthroughs since beta blockers and steroids. Bigger, even.’

She looked at him, feeling a little cold. ‘Oh, Is that the
thing that matters most to you? Making a deal with a pharmaceutical company?’

‘But of course! It’s a pharmaceutical that I’m making the pitch to. I told you that, didn’t I?’

‘I — Perhaps I didn’t register it if you did.’ She shook her head. ‘I have a — Shall we say I’m not as enamoured of the pharmaceutical people as you seem to be.’

He frowned. ‘How do you mean?’

She shrugged. ‘Oh, you know. They make all these profits out of sickness: a drug breakthrough in cancer or AIDS and whey-hey, up go the share prices. People make vast profits.’

‘You’ve been in England too long,’ he said after a moment. ‘Profit ain’t a dirty word, you know.’

She sighed. ‘I suppose not. But in the context of illness …’

‘Hey, George, think this through, will you? If I can refine this therapy and it’s widely applied to all the people like those out there’ — he jerked his head towards the door that led out to the main corridor and the bay full of patients — ‘can you see how much money the NHS will
save?
Quite apart from the human misery involved in dealing with these godawful demyelinating diseases, they just soak up money and manpower, you know that So maybe I’ll make a profit — I sure as hell intend to — but it’s the sort of profit that no one has to apologize for.’

She stood for a moment and then made a little grimace. ‘I guess I’ve got some more thinking to do,’ she said. ‘And I suppose the important thing
is
finding a therapy for a horrible bunch of disorders. So, like I said, now what?’

He had moved away from her now, to her relief, and he looked at his watch. ‘The others should be here soon,’ he said. ‘We were going to have a complete run-through of our session with these people, and I think they’d value your input as much as I did. Ah! About time too! Hi, Frances.’

The door had opened and a tall woman was standing there looking faintly surprised. She had rather faded red hair pulled back from a fleshy face and deep lines between her
eyebrows that made her look rather fierce. George had a vague memory of seeing her at Professor Hunnisett’s farewell party, and the things Zack had told her about the work she was doing on female hormones.

‘Oh,’ Frances Llewellyn said. Her voice was surprisingly soft, even sweet. ‘Am I late? I thought you said to be here about —’

‘It’s all right,’ Zack said quickly. ‘No matter. Is Michael with you?’

‘Michael?’ she sounded surprised. ‘Is he coming too?’

‘Oh, Frances!’ Zack said in an indulgent voice and Frances Llewellyn frowned even more deeply, but it was clear to George that this was with puzzlement, rather than with annoyance. ‘You know I arranged all this last week! Anyway, let me phone him. He said he’d be here and —’

Behind Frances the door moved again and George smiled at the man who came in. He too was someone she had seen at the Prof.’s party, and also around Old East’s various departments, one of the army of familiar strangers with whom she spent so much of her working life. He smiled back tentatively, and his glasses, big and round and rather thick, glinted in the evening sunlight and became suddenly blank, like those of the cartoon character of her childhood, ‘Little Orphan Annie’. It gave him a rather threatening look, but then he moved further into the room and showed himself for what he was: a rather small man with a fussy manner who was far from ominous.

‘Hello, Zack,’ he said, his voice almost as soft as Frances’s. ‘I got your message, though I wasn’t quite sure —’

‘Well,’ Zack said heartily. ‘As long as we’re all here. Now, let’s get on with it, shall we? George has already been of inestimable value to me, because she brings such a fresh approach to what I’m doing, and I know she can do it for you. So how about it? Presentation time. Or at least the rehearsal.’

It had been a bewildering evening in many ways, George thought as she walked to the hospital next day, through the cool of the early morning streets. She paused on Tower Bridge, as she did whenever she could, to lean on the parapet and watch the river go by, still thinking.

Both Frances Llewellyn and Michael Klein had seemed a little startled by her presence at their meeting, but were clearly too polite to express it. They had done pretty much as Zack asked them to, obediently trotting through the representations they would be making to their potential fonder; and she had sat and listened and shared some of their puzzlement.

Because there was no doubt in her mind that their research was of a very different order from Zack’s. Frances, in seeking the root causes of a range of psychiatric conditions associated with key events in women’s lives involving hormones — puberty, childbirth, menopause — was treading a well-delineated path. Many had walked this way before her, seeking some sort of hormonal answer to the depressions and disorders that so often made women’s lives a misery. There had been that fashion back in the seventies for filling women with vast doses of progesterone, in the belief that it would prevent pre-menstrual tension, post-natal illness and menopausal angst That had been based on minimal science and
had foundered; now at least Frances was trying to give the idea a sound theoretical basis, but George had small hope that she would succeed. The therapy had worked unreliably when used empirically — on the basis of its effect on symptoms — and there was no reason why, going by the work she was describing, that it would work any better when used scientifically Frances Llewellyn, George told herself, as the soft-voiced woman droned on about her samples and her assays, has as much chance of getting a Nobel as I have of going single-handed round the world in a hot-air balloon, and there’s no way any pharmaceutical company is going to beat a path to her door with handfuls of money.

The outlook wasn’t quite as gloomy with Michael Klein. In his search for answers to the problems of adolescent addiction to various substances, ranging from marijuana to meth-ylenedioxy methamphetamine, aka MDM or Ecstasy, and glysergide pheniclilene, popularly called PCP or Angel Dust, to good old-fashioned alcohol, he had come up with an overarching theory that there were in certain people a set of enzymes which, acting together, made their unfortunate owners much more likely to become addicted as a result of experimenting. It was his belief, he said, that the enzymes were as genetically determined as eye colour or body build and that he could, given the chance to work on his theories, come up with proof.

He had stopped then to stare owlishly at George, and she had said, almost without stopping to think, ‘And then what?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Well, OK, you prove that addiction is due to a genetically determined set of enzyme responses —’

‘Acting in a cascade. Yes.’

‘Well, so you prove it. What value does that have? How can you use your proof?’

He had blinked and looked blankly at her. ‘I am involved in pure research. I don’t think at all about the application in any direct way.’

Zack had thrown her a sharp glance at that, but she ignored it. ‘Well, yes, that’s very admirable, but you’re hospital based, aren’t you? Won’t the people you’re pitching to expect you to be after some sort of therapy for patients? Or even just a test to identify people at risk?’ She stopped then. ‘Hell, no. That would never do, would it? That would be ethically impossible.’

Klein said nothing. It was Zack and Frances who showed interest. ‘In what way?’ Frances asked.

‘How would you use it? I can’t imagine the average teenager agreeing to be tested if he’s told it’s to find out if he could become an addict. I’m damned sure I wouldn’t have done! I’d rather have gambled the way you do when you’re a kid and know yourself to be immortal. And as for parents — if they insisted on using the test, then if it was negative their kids would expect a
carte blanche
to go out and try everything druggy they could get their hands on, because they’d be safe from the risk of addiction,’

‘A sort of Junkies’ Charter,’ Zack murmured.

‘This is nonsense.’ Klein spoke much more strongly now, and his glasses seemed to glitter with new-found energy. ‘I am seeking only to find out why some people become addicts after experimental exposure to mind-altering substances, and why some do not. No more than that. As for what use the research will be put to —’

Zack laughed. ‘Try Pillpopper and Potionshaker’s latest wonder drug! Two tablets twice a day and then go out and get safely stoned! Can’t you just see it!’ Once more he looked at George, this time with a sort of triumphant expression on his face. But again she refused to pay any attention to him.

‘Since I was asked here to offer an outsider’s view of your chances,’ she said carefully. ‘I think I have to say, Dr Klein —’

‘Michael,’ he muttered.

‘Michael,’ she said obediently. ‘That I can’t see what’s in it for them. As I understand it, the people you have to get your funds from are pharmaceutical companies —’

‘Who want a return on their investment,’ Zack said. ‘I keep telling you that, Mike. I’m glad George is saying it. And I didn’t say a word to her in advance, did I?’ He looked again at George. ‘What she said was totally unprompted, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she said a little unwillingly.

‘And if they can’t see what’s in it for them, then they don’t fund you. And if they don’t, we’re all in real trouble here at the Institute. Like Hunnisett said — keeps on saying — it’s up to us to keep the place going. If we can attract the funds then we stay in business. If we can’t…’

He had jumped up suddenly and had begun to march about the room as though there was too much energy in him to be contained. ‘It’s why I keep on so about this. I don’t want the hassle of having to find some other place to set myself up as a researcher. It was tough enough getting settled here, and unless at least one of you two comes up with something the funders will find tasty — like my project — then we could all be out on our ears.’

There was a little silence and then Frances said stiffly, ‘I’m as aware as you are of the significance of this funding appeal, Zack, but it doesn’t mean we have to cut corners and do bad work just in order to get money. If Michael doesn’t feel able to tell the funders that he’s after a therapy as such then he shouldn’t have to. I
am
after a therapy, of course.’ She almost preened for a moment. ‘So, maybe between us, you and I, we can do what is necessary, and leave Michael to hoe his own row. But really it won’t do to push him this way, you know. I wasn’t quite sure why you wanted this meeting, to tell the truth, but now I can see.’ She threw a look of pure dislike at George. ‘You’re worried about your own situation more than you’re really concerned about the work Michael and I are doing. It’s not purely scientific interest on your part, is it? Just a means to your own ends.’

Goddam Zack, George thought furiously. He’s set me up. He wanted to put extra pressure on them, just as she says, and he used me to do it. And she had been so angry that when
the others had packed up their work — both behaving rather stiffly now — and gone, and he’d grinned at her and told her he’d booked a table at a terrific restaurant, she had shaken her head crisply.

‘I won’t, after all,’ she had said, her voice as flat as she could make it. ‘I’ve started a pig of a headache. And it’s been a long day. Some other time, maybe.’ And she had gone, leaving Zack there in Laburnum Ward’s seminar room on his own as she fled past the bays of hopeless blank-faced people, trying not to think about what had happened.

She had opted to leave her car at the hospital and walk home and had plodded her way through the dusty tired streets, her head down and her hands shoved into the pockets of her jacket, still trying not to think and failing miserably.

She had always known herself to be easily beguiled by charming people. She was not one of those who announced proudly, ‘I’m a great judge of character,’ by which they meant they made up their minds swiftly that a person was unreliable and then gave them no chance to prove otherwise. She had always admitted that she needed time to get to know people and had a marked tendency to like everyone she met and to go on doing so until something happened to change her opinion.