Chapter 11
Josh
A few nights after I tell Rachel about the pill, she gets home from work to find me and Wilf in the living room.
‘I thought it might be useful for us all to sit down and talk,’ I say, as she pauses in the doorway.
She looks doubtful about this, probably because Wilf’s usually a man of few words. He even declined to be my best man because he didn’t think he’d have enough to say in a speech.
The flat smells of toast, and the coffee table is covered with empty mugs and piles of paper printouts, as though we’ve been chairing a council of war.
I mean, the past couple of hours have actually been something of a battle for me, on the brainpower front, as Wilf has been attempting to walk me through a paper he’s drafted on the mechanics of the pill.
Objectively speaking, his genius staggers me. The potential of this thing. What if everyone took it at, say, the age of twenty-one? How many illnesses and early deaths could be averted? How many lives transformed?
Rachel takes a seat in the armchair near the fireplace. As she does, I notice her mascara is smudged. Has she been crying?
The bank where she works in HR has recently been taken over by a bigger bank with fewer scruples, which means part of her job is now to fire a load of her colleagues and dress it up as redundancy.
This, I know, is the kind of corporate savagery that keeps her awake at night.
It’s got worse since she became a manager last year, which has meant daily full-body immersion into the choppy waters of office politics.
But my wife is nothing if not determined. I know without having to ask that she’s going to stick it out.
I meet her eye and mouth, ‘You okay?’
She nods, shoots me a little talk later wink.
I offer her tea, but she declines, removing her heels and suit jacket, twisting her loose hair into a topknot.
Wilf picks up the book I’ve been reading from the arm of the sofa. Jurassic Park. He flicks through it. ‘Interesting choice.’
He knows me too well. ‘Coincidence,’ I mumble.
Rachel frowns as if she has no idea what we’re talking about, which might feasibly be true, since she turned down my invite to come and watch a film about dinosaurs when it was released, in favour of a night drinking pisco sours with Polly and Ingrid.
Wilf dunks a biscuit into his mug of tea. ‘Right. I should say from the outset that what we discuss doesn’t leave this room.’
‘Fine,’ Rachel says. Then, ‘So, you really took this pill?’
Wilf shrugs. ‘I wouldn’t expect Josh to be my guinea pig. I had seizures and clots in mind, things like that. Look, in an ideal world the pill would have gone through more rounds of testing at this point, but time’s not on—’
I feel my stomach upturn. ‘Hang on. You took that pill for me?’
‘Yes?’ he says, through a mouthful of custard cream.
‘Can its effects be reversed?’ Rachel says.
She told me the other night, when we finally sat down to eat our cod and artichokes at getting on for midnight, that as far as she was concerned this was the point upon which there could be zero margin for error.
‘No. The pill alters the body on a cellular level. There’s no changing your mind.’
‘You say that like it’s not a big deal.’
She directs this at Wilf, but really I know she is speaking to me. To try to remind me. Because she knows that – in the absence of fear – I would ordinarily never contemplate doing something like this.
I’ve been known to make the odd questionable decision over the years. Ignoring the warnings about our money-pit flat. Bleaching my hair for a dare that time. Strapping myself into a helicopter with that weirdo who wanted to date my mum.
But this . . . this is different. It’s funny, what fear can do – the logic it can assign to insanity. Pulling a trigger. Trying to win your money back from the bookies. Freezing on the spot, when in fact you need to flee.
Wilf appears to concurrently consider and reject Rachel’s statement. ‘Everyone’s scared of things they don’t understand.’
At this, I have to step in. ‘I don’t think this is necessarily a brainpower issue, mate.’
‘I agree,’ says Wilf, sipping his tea and reaching for another biscuit. ‘In fact, I was referring to the kind of knowledge commonly referred to as explicit—’
‘Sorry, but isn’t this all a bit Dolly-the-sheep?’ Rachel blurts.
We both look at her.
‘Um, what?’ I say gently.
‘Well,’ she says carefully, clearly mindful that Wilf likely feels towards his invention as most people do their firstborn child, ‘you could argue it’s no different. From cloning a sheep, I mean. It might be seen as trying to play God, messing with the natural order of things.’
‘I don’t believe in God,’ Wilf says. ‘And anyway, the creation of Dolly has transformed the landscape of scientific thinking. Her birth indicates that therapeutic cloning is a genuine possibility. Cloning technology could create healthy tissues which could then be transplanted to heal—’
‘Sorry – why are we talking about cloning?’ I ask.
‘People have said the same about every world-changing invention,’ Wilf points out. ‘The light bulb. The telephone. Bicycles. Penicillin.’
Rachel and I both know we have about as much chance of winning a scientific debate with Wilf as we do of standing on the podium at the next Olympic Games.
But not everything comes down to how big your brain cells are.
The next morning, I wake feeling brighter. Deep down, I know this is because what Wilf has done has given me hope. He’s thrown me a lifeline I never thought could or would exist. Now, I might actually have a way out of the early death I have felt so sure for so long is coming for me.
And Rachel is at least willing to talk about it. She hasn’t shut it down. I am optimistic, perhaps for the first time, that we can come to some kind of agreement about what to do next.
I wake her with a kiss. I am already showered and dressed, off to work early to prep for class with a coffee on campus.
‘I love you,’ I whisper.
‘Josh?’ Her skin is warm from the bed, her eyes still part-drugged with sleep.
‘Yeah.’
‘Promise me you won’t take it without telling me.’
‘What?’
Her pupils chase mine. ‘The pill. Just . . . promise me you won’t take it. Not without telling me.’
‘Of course I won’t. I wouldn’t. I promise.’
‘You don’t owe Wilf anything. I know he’s done all of this for you . . . but you didn’t ask him to.’
‘I know.’
‘Hey, come here.’
I hesitate, stomach twitching. ‘What?’
‘You have time,’ she whispers, with a smile.
‘I really don’t.’
But even as I’m saying it I’m kneeling over her on the mattress, pressing my lips to hers.
We kiss, softly at first and then more hungrily.
I keep insisting I have to go, I really need to prep, I’ll be late.
But the whole while, I am easing away the satin straps of her top, and she is reaching down to feel me, smilingly unzipping my fly, and I am breathing, ‘Fuck,’ then, ‘Wait, wait, socks, socks,’ laughing as I kick them off.
She flicks my belt undone and tugs down my jeans, the underwear I put on less than ten minutes ago.
She sits up, pushes me gently on to my back.
Works her way down my body, then closes her mouth around me.
I sling my head back and bite my lip, one hand lost in her hair.
I tug the duvet into my other fist, shudders of pleasure passing from me to her as I feel myself depart earth.