Zodiac Station (37 page)

‘But before he came, I’d started my PhD with Martin. That was where I met Louise. She was smart, pretty and ambitious. We worked hard, we played hard, we had a lot in common. Soon, we fell in love.’

Like a lot of stories, it sounds easy when you tell it back. I’d had a few girlfriends at university, but I still wasn’t confident. Louise seemed so cool and unattainable. It felt like an eternity – really, it was only a few weeks – before I plucked up my courage and asked her out. Afterwards, she admitted she only said yes because she was so sure I hated her. Apparently, I look ferocious when I’m concentrating.

‘I said we worked hard. Unfortunately, the work in Martin’s lab was tedious as hell. Endless cycles of heating and cooling, freezing and melting, measuring tiny fragments of amino acids to see if they’d grown at all. Martin had a great story to tell about how he was going to upend the scientific consensus, make us famous and answer the greatest mystery of all – the origins of life. That was why we came. The problem was, the science didn’t agree with him. After a year, it looked as if I wouldn’t have a single positive result to write up in my thesis. Which didn’t have to be the end of the world: you can publish a thesis on negative results. But it won’t get you a job afterwards.’

Even now, when I’m just the lab tech and it’s someone else’s career on the line, I still get that black hole in my stomach when an experiment doesn’t turn out.

‘Then Richie hit the department like a minor earthquake. This was 2003. The human genome had been mapped a couple of years earlier, the technology was improving every month, and all over the world scientists were doing things that had never been done before. A real frontier, while our careers were dying in a backwater. And Pharaoh was three steps ahead already. While everyone else was still trying to sequence genes and DNA, he was looking at how you could
make
it. Synthetic biology – artificial life. Martin wanted to know how life began once upon a time. Richie Pharaoh was going to make it happen here and now. He reasoned that if you stitched enough genes together in a machine, eventually your creation would cough into life. That was the theory, anyway.

‘Louise went first. She was impatient for success, and she was falling out with Martin all the time on how slowly things were going. She looked at Pharaoh and saw everything she wanted for her career. I followed her a bit later. I didn’t get any funding to do the degree – I borrowed the money – so I couldn’t afford not to get a job at the end of it.’

It all happened pretty fast, June to September. By the time the undergrads came back in October, we were both settled in Pharaoh’s lab. But in my memory, those months go on for ever, like the first summer you fall in love or work a job. Long hot afternoons (the fabled summer of 2003!) moping around the lab; long nights, Louise and me sitting out on the back step, drinking rum and Coke, sometimes until the sun came up. Me worrying, her cajoling. So much riding on it, everything at stake. These days, summer just means stressing about childcare.

‘I felt bad for Martin. Losing a PhD student isn’t good for an academic: it counts against you when things like promotion come up. But actually, I think it’s the personal rejection that hurt Martin more. He’d treated us like his children, nurtured us and opened his mind to us – and we’d told him he wasn’t good enough.’

I saw Greta’s mouth tighten, and remembered she was on Martin’s side.

‘The first few months in Pharaoh’s lab were a golden time. He had so much grant money coming in, he could do what he wanted. Hagger’s lab was a scrapyard compared to the shiny new toys in Pharaoh’s. Every time the manufacturers had a new machine, Richie was the first to get it, often before it came on the market. We went to Rome and Avignon and Prague for our lab meetings. And the data flowed so quickly we could hardly write it up fast enough.

‘Of course, it came at a price. We thought we’d been working hard before: Pharaoh worked us twice as hard. The pressure to publish, to get papers into good journals, was immense. I think half the people in his lab ended up leaving with stress illnesses or chronic fatigue. We didn’t play hard any more; we didn’t play much at all. We were tired, we were busy and we got sloppy with a few things. That was how we ended up with Luke.’

When the test came up positive, Louise hit the roof. Left home for three days, wouldn’t answer my calls or my texts. I almost reported her missing to the police. At that stage, I had no doubt she’d terminated the pregnancy. I just hoped she was alive.

I found out afterwards she’d been with Pharaoh. Strangely enough, he was the one who persuaded her to keep the baby. He told her creating life was the most powerful thing people could do. He said it was hypocritical to study life in a test tube but shy away from the real thing. He must have said other things, too; whatever it was, it did the trick. She came home, went straight online and started looking at nurseries and engagement rings. We never spoke about it again.

‘From day one, Louise saw Luke only as an obstacle. Two weeks after he was born, she was back at work. We couldn’t afford childcare, and we didn’t have any relatives on hand. Louise’s parents live in France, my dad lives alone and can hardly make himself a cup of tea, let alone look after a baby. Neither of us was willing to defer our PhDs. So we juggled. I took Luke during the day, while Louise worked, and at night I’d creep into the lab with the cleaning staff to try and eke out a few results.

‘In retrospect, I suppose it was obvious the marriage would fail. We hardly saw each other, and we hadn’t been married long enough to have much credit in the bank. We were exhausted the whole time, both felt we were running on a treadmill and couldn’t keep up. I was failing as a scientist, failing as a husband and failing as a father. And I knew it. I didn’t see Pharaoh any more, except when I dragged myself in for supervision meetings to be told how far behind I’d fallen. In Pharaoh’s lab, there were no prizes for trying. If you were doing well, there was nothing he wouldn’t give you. If you didn’t meet expectations, you were dead meat. Natural selection, he called it, and he wasn’t joking. There was no shortage of young carnivores waiting to take my place.’

I get shortness of breath thinking about it now. Back then, there were afternoons when I almost called 999 I was so sure I was having a heart attack.

‘I said Louise and I were getting sloppy, and it wasn’t just at home. Pharaoh drove us so hard, the only way to get results – publishable results – was by cutting corners. Everybody in the lab did it; the people who flourished were the ones who could do it most plausibly. Without any pangs of conscience.

‘By that stage, I hardly knew what Louise was doing in the lab. One day, she came home at lunchtime. I remember it – she hardly ever got home before Luke’s bedtime, and I was so happy she’d come to see us. We sat outside and I opened a bottle of wine. The moment she’d had a sip, she almost collapsed in tears. And Louise didn’t do tears.

‘She told me there was a problem. She’d forgotten to fill in an ethics form, and now the department had started to ask questions. At first I didn’t see why that mattered: an ethics form is just bureaucracy. Forgetting it means a rap on the knuckles, but if you get a high-impact paper out of the research nobody remembers. As long as there aren’t any complications.

‘There
were
complications. For a start, it wasn’t that she didn’t have ethics approval for one experiment; they didn’t have approval for any of it. Pharaoh was so paranoid about revealing his work, he simply ignored procedure. And it got worse. Louise had been working on artificially reconstructing a modified version of a coronavirus. If you think you’ve heard of that, it’s because it hit the news about ten years ago as the cause of SARS. Now, we worked in a big building in the science park. One floor down were people working on genetic diseases, treatments for Parkinson’s, leukaemia, you name it. A big building, lots of test tubes shuttling around, lots of expensive trials – and one of her batches had gone missing.

‘She went through forty-eight hours of hell wondering if some kid with cancer had been injected with her virus. She had to report it, of course. She was suspended and the whole building got locked down. The university threatened to cut off funding completely – not just for Pharaoh, but for everyone in the Institute.

‘In the end, they found her samples sitting on a benchtop three doors down from her lab. Dyslexic delivery man misread the room number: no harm done. But I told you Pharaoh was arrogant. He’d made a lot of enemies higher up the totem pole, plenty of people who wanted to take him down a peg. If it came out he’d sanctioned his students synthesising the virus without any kind of approval or oversight, all the grants and publications in the world wouldn’t save him. We both knew the only way he could protect himself was to cut her loose.’

I gazed out the window, staring at the white horizon.

‘I took the blame myself. To protect Louise, of course, and Luke: rationally, I knew her career prospects were better than mine. But also to impress her. I knew, deep down, our marriage was pretty far gone, but I thought the grand gesture might win her back. And I hoped it would buy me some slack with Pharaoh. Louise was always his golden girl. It had to count for something.’

Without looking, I could tell Greta was rolling her eyes at me.

‘You’re right. Louise and Richie had already started their affair: I still don’t know how they found the time. His marriage was breaking up. As soon as the scandal had died down, and his divorce came through, she told me she was leaving.’

All my memories of that time are darkness: winter afternoons, and endless nights of fights that only ended when Luke woke up in tears and I had to go to settle him. I felt as though my whole life had been fed into a shredder; I didn’t know if I could go on. A cold winter, but it never snowed.

‘I got custody – Louise didn’t contest it – and eventually finished my PhD at the Open University. I tried for a few postdoc jobs, but nobody wanted to hear from me. I ended up as an overqualified lab technician, wondering where my career had gone and doing the best I could by Luke. Just another single parent trying to squeeze through life.’

‘And she died in a plane crash,’ Greta remembered.

‘A few years ago. Pharaoh was a keen pilot. They were working in Alaska, Pharaoh had been given big money, ten million dollars from the National Institutes of Health, to set up a lab there. One day, he and Louise took off for a sightseeing trip in the Brooks Range and never came back. Some people suggested suicide – there was talk the money had gone missing and the NIH were asking questions – but I didn’t buy that. No one loved life more than Richie Pharaoh.’

‘Must have been tough,’ said Greta.

‘To be honest, it was more like finding out some distant cousin had died. Sad, but not traumatic. I hadn’t seen her in years, by then. Nor had Luke. I didn’t think much about her, or Richie Pharaoh. Until Martin emailed me.’

That wasn’t true. It never went away. I couldn’t look at Luke without seeing Louise in him. Every day at work, watching the DNA unspool on our machines – the code of life – I’d think about how my life might have been different.

But I’d already told Greta more than I ever had anyone else. There are parts of that even my sister doesn’t know.

‘It probably sounds pathetic.’

Greta shrugged. ‘Sometimes life is shitty.’

I couldn’t argue with that.

Nothing had changed on the Helbreen. I got out of the cab, wincing as the cold hit my stiff joints.

‘The crevasse was a dead end.’ Unfortunate phrasing. ‘He never went down there until he was pushed in.’

It wasn’t hard to find the moulin. Since I’d been there, someone – maybe Annabel – had roped it off, to stop anyone else falling in. I removed the barrier, while Greta fastened our climbing lines to the Sno-Cat. There seemed to be an awful lot of rope.

‘How far down are we going?’

‘Maybe twenty metres. Maybe one hundred.’

She handed me a helmet.

‘I wish I’d had this last time,’ I said, though I wasn’t really in the mood for joking. Revisiting the past had unsettled me, like when you wake from a dream just as it’s reaching its climax. Even though you’re awake, it won’t let go of you.

I clipped into the harness and walked carefully to the edge of the hole. Whatever damage they’d done pulling me out, the wind and the snow had smoothed it over so cleanly only a tiny opening remained.

‘I go first.’ Greta kicked away loose snow to widen the hole, then pirouetted around and walked backwards into it.

I flicked on my head torch and followed.

Anderson’s Journal

You expect ice to be clammy when you touch it. Your body heat goes to work and the surface gets slick. But not in the glacier. As I lowered myself in, bracing myself against the sides of the chute, the ice remained dry as dust. Against the vast cold of a glacier, a human body doesn’t count for much.

The hole dropped a couple of metres, then angled away down a gentle slope. I crawled down after Greta, careful not to tangle myself on the rope. The tunnel was almost a perfect cylinder, as if it had been bored out by machine. Under my hands, the milky white walls swirled like marble.

The slope got steeper. Rather than waste energy, I sat down on my bottom and let myself slide, like being in a water pipe.

‘
Stop!
’ said Greta. The desperate voice you use to a child who’s about to run into the street. I grabbed my rope and just stopped myself bumping into her.

She leaned to one side so I could see over her shoulder. My torch beam shone into almost perfect darkness, dropping away far beyond where the light could reach.

‘Lucky you stopped where you did.’

I twisted my head to see more. Something flashed: a blade of light cutting the darkness in two. I brought the light back on to it and saw an icicle. Not the kind you get dripping from your gutters during a cold snap; this was taller than me and probably as broad at the top. At the bottom, it was as sharp as a needle. And we were going to be descending right under it.