Free The Heart Broke In by James Meek Page B

thick film, turned the nosepiece to the x100 objective and looked through the binocular lenses at the indigo field of stained serum. It was full of her parasite,
H. gregi
, dark blue dots in the chicken’s blood cells, growing to be killed and made into vaccine. She counted the number of parasites and leukocytes she could see, moved the slide a few microns to the left and counted again. She did this a hundred times.
    When she finished with the slide from the incubator, she turned to her own blood. It wasn’t part of the programme, but she liked to keep an eye on what
gregi
was up to in there. She studied hundreds of fields; at field 405 she saw a blurry darkness inside the walls of one of her cells and whistled a fanfare to herself. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘My dear little hypnozoite.’
    Bec dallied at the lab, eating crisps from the vending machine. The incubators were full and the data was written up. In the early evening Val called and said that it wasn’t too late, they could still meet. It was essential to Bec that she didn’t lie to Val, yet she had no reason to stay at work. As he talked he steadily lowered a slab of obligation onto her. She felt its weight, and she would either have to come up with a way to make more haemoproteus, or see him.
    She saw the face of the security guard on his rounds peeping at her through the view panel in the door and remembered that there were boxes of anaerobic flasks and candle jars in the basement.
    ‘I still have more to do,’ she told Val.
    ‘It’s Sunday. You’ve been there all day,’ said Val. ‘If there’s extra work get your minions to do it.’
    Bec got the guard to open up the store room and help her carry the boxes upstairs. She cut them open carelessly, ignoring the instructions not to use knives. She pulled the anaerobic flasks out of their sterile packaging and set up an assembly line with flasks, petri dishes, cultures and pipette. One by one she filled the flasks with primed dishes, popped the catalyst in and closed the seal. She emptied her mind of everything but the work. Once she’d finished with the flasks she set about another round of parasite production with the centre’s old stock of candle jars. The flame drifted from point to point as Bec lit candles and placed the jars over them and they gulped down their oxygen and went out until every free horizontal space in the lab was covered in glass or flasks. The lab smelled of burned wax. Bec turned up the extractor fan and put out all the lights except a single reading lamp on the desk in her office.
    It was midnight. The lamp shone a sharp yellow disc of light onto the pale varnished pine of the desk and the copy of
Parasitology Today
Bec intended to read, and a wider sphere of dimmer illumination, floating in the darkness, that Bec clambered into with a mug of mint tea. She sat in the padded chair, let down her hair, took off her lab coat, wrapped it over her front like a blanket, tucked her feet up under her, read the first sentence of the first article, yawned, laid her cheek on her folded arms and went to sleep.

12
    Next day at seven in the evening Ritchie drew up outside his sister’s bleak workplace, saw her standing at the gate and tooted. She opened the car door. He could tell she’d spent the night in the lab. Unwashed women, even his own flesh and blood, aroused a primitive fear. Instinctively he put out his hand to stop her sitting down on the new leather next to him, uttered a panicky bleat and faked a reason.
    ‘Don’t you want to put your bag in the back?’ he said.
    ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Bec. She dropped herself carelessly into the passenger seat, kicking her bag into the corner. It rattled with small things. Ritchie supposed he would find some of these things in the car’s far crannies over the months to come; and who knew what she carried with her when she left that house of disease at the end of the day?
    ‘New car,’ said Bec, pleased to notice it. The