Free The Heart Broke In by James Meek

flash …’
    ‘Do you have a target? Are you competing with your friends?’
    ‘No questions before breakfast,’ said C/Karl, holding her shoulders from behind. His hands slipped over her breasts and she reached up and fondled his shaven head, warm like some just-baked thing. She plucked the cigarette from his mouth and took a drag.
    ‘I have to go,’ said Bec.
    ‘Do you really not know how many men you’ve slept with?’
    Bec looked at him, breathed out a cloud and said she’d been with three men already that week.
    C/Karl snatched his hands off her as if contact would burn them and moved crabwise back in the bedclothes. His eyes became remote and tough. She couldn’t tell, when he clasped his hands over his knees, looked down and shook his head with something like a laugh, if he was disapproving or envious or just surprised.
    She told a friend. ‘Four in one week is quite a lot,’ said the friend. ‘I never had four in one week. I never had two in one week.’
    ‘That was the only time,’ said Bec. ‘I was feeling unvalued. But still, who says it’s a lot?’
    The friend wriggled. ‘It sort of kills the idea there’s any intimacy there.’
    ‘Is that obvious? Is there a law? Is there a rule? You wouldn’t say it was a lot if I said I made four new friends in one week.’
    ‘That would be shocking,’ said the friend.
    ‘So you’re shocked.’
    ‘You’re a scientist. You’re looking for the kind of certainties in life that you find in the lab.’
    ‘You talk as if there are certainties, as if it’s an obvious rule that having sex with four men in one week is excessive, and I don’t see that it is obvious.’ She’d raised her voice and became aware that the mothers with toddlers in the café were looking at them. She and the friend leaned in closer to each other.
    ‘And what about his list?’ said Bec. ‘He wasn’t a scientist, he worked in a chichi coffee shop and made dance tracks, and he was imposing his grid on the world like a system to live by.’
    ‘It wasn’t a theory, was it,’ said the friend. ‘He was just trying to keep a handle on matters. Look.’ She woke her iPhone and flicked to an app called ManRater. She showed Bec how it assigned points; plus two for being funny, plus one for every £2o,000 a man earned over the minimum wage, plus two for wanting children, minus one for every previous marriage after the first, plus two for being tall, plus two for being big, plus three for being very big.
    ‘It syncs with your contacts,’ she said.
    ‘How much is love worth?’ asked Bec.
    ‘You get plus two if he loves you, and plus one if you love him.’
    ‘That’s rather sad.’
    ‘It does seem to set the bar low.’
    ‘It’s just a game, though, isn’t it?’ said Bec. ‘It’s just scratching the surface.’
    ‘Surface is all most of us have,’ said the friend, her eyes widening and fixing on Bec. ‘Surface is a lot to be getting on with.’
    ‘Did you pay for it?’ said Bec.
    ‘Fifty-nine pence,’ said the friend, and that made them laugh.

11
    Early on Sunday Bec took the Tube to her lab at the Centre for Parasite Control. Through the grubby metal-framed windows of the old concrete block the slats of Venetian blinds could be seen, pushed up slantwise by pot plants, faded sheaves of printed matter and old plastic cutaway models of the workings of parasites, painted in Atomic Age colours of teal, cream, tongue-pink and kidney-brown.
    On the third floor she hauled on a buttonless lab coat over her white linen shirt and jeans. In a secure airlocked room five incubators, grey and new and taller than she was, hummed sweetly and their lights shone steadily. They were the reward for her discovery.
    ‘Why not put them in Dar es Salaam instead of making the stuff here and taking it there?’ she once asked.
    Maddie told her the Africans wouldn’t look after them properly. They couldn’t afford the running costs, she said.
    ‘We can afford them,’ said