Brian Freemantle: Dead End

‘Yes,’ said Parnell.

‘I think you’re right,’ declared Benn, on another tangent. ‘I think there could be work we could do together.’

‘There can’t be any doubt: we’re virtually the left and right hand, each having to know what the other’s doing and how we can each realistically decide how to complement the other, towards a successful development.’ He’d gone straight from Cambridge University into the rarefied atmosphere of pure medical research, Parnell reminded himself. But he wasn’t in any rarefied atmosphere any longer. He was in the real, hard-headed commercial world now. How difficult would the adjustment be?

‘Hi!’

Parnell looked up from Science Today, beside his unseen, stabbed-at lunch, to the dark-haired girl smiling down upon him. ‘Hi.’

‘This seat taken?’

‘Help yourself.’ He stood politely, taking her tray as she unloaded the sandwich and a pickle, the same choice he’d made. He saw there were several alternative empty tables throughout the commissary.

‘My name’s Rebecca.’

‘I know,’ said Parnell. The ID tag hanging from her neck chain matched the nameplate on her white laboratory coat, both reading ‘Rebecca Lang.’

‘And I know that you’re Richard Parnell,’ she said, reading his identification.

‘Name badges, one of the great American innovations,’ acknowledged Parnell. He closed the journal.

‘You don’t have to do that – stop reading, I mean.’

‘Of course I do.’ He sliced his sandwich, salt beef on rye, more easily to eat.

‘Now I feel uncomfortable.’ She bit into her sandwich without cutting it.

‘No, you don’t.’

She smiled again, her teeth a tribute to attentive dentistry and teenage torture. Confident that she didn’t need any more facial help, Rebecca wore only a light lipstick, pale pink like her nail colouring. ‘All right, so I don’t. Want to know a secret?’

‘Sure.’ Parnell heard his own word and thought it sounded American. An early resolution was that he wouldn’t let himself relapse into any idiom. It was one of several preconceptions.

She nodded generally around the restaurant. ‘It was a bet, who got to talk to you first.’

‘Talk to me first!’

‘The mysterious and famous foreigner publicly known for his work on the genome project!’

‘And you won?’

‘I’m here talking to you, so I guess I did.’

‘I’m English, which is hardly mysterious. And a lot of people are known for what they did on the genome project. It was an international effort, involving many people.’

Rebecca nodded to the closed magazine. ‘It’s you everyone wrote about.’

‘What’s your prize?’ Parnell wished he could go back to Science Today.

‘Who knows?’ It wasn’t a coquettish remark.

‘What section are you in?’ If he had to talk, it might as well be professional.

‘Back of the bus stuff, co-ordinating and cross-referencing overseas research with what we’re doing here, where it’s applicable. Flagging up stuff that might be worthwhile our pursuing further, concentrating upon.’

‘I’d say that makes you a pretty important person, too.’

She sniggered. ‘There are a lot of units. I don’t do it all by myself!’

‘Any breakthroughs?’

The girl hesitated. ‘Not yet. Ever hopeful.’

‘Still quite a responsibility for someone who considers themself at the back of the bus.’

‘There’s a line manager checking me and a section head checking him. It’s all very structured. Haven’t you appreciated everything’s run here to a tightly ordered and controlled set of rules?’

‘I’m beginning to get the idea.’

‘I told you my secret. Now tell me yours.’

Parnell looked blankly at her. ‘I don’t know what you’re asking.’

‘How come you got shifted so quickly from the back of the bus?’

Parnell no longer regretted putting his magazine aside, trying to separate the discordant echoes of this exchange from the earlier one with Russell Benn. ‘How can you imagine there’s something secret about it, just like that?’ He snapped his fingers.

‘Everything’s very structured,’ she emphasized again. ‘You were given your space but you moved it.’

‘It was temporary,’ avoided Parnell.

Rebecca regarded him doubtfully over her coffee mug, her sandwich abandoned half eaten. ‘You’re at the heart of the Spider’s Web now. That’s where the real research is.’

‘And where I want – and need – to be to fulfil my appointment and justify the creation of the new department,’ said Parnell.

‘ You want to be,’ she isolated, at once.

‘Where I have to be,’ Parnell reiterated.

‘You really think genetics could bring about miracles?’

‘No,’ Parnell immediately answered. ‘I think it’s an avenue with medical benefits that has to be explored, to discover what its engineering can achieve.’ And I’m going to be among the first to achieve it, he promised himself.

‘I don’t think he’s our sort of team player,’ judged Russell Benn.

‘It’ll take time,’ predicted Dwight Newton. ‘In time he’ll learn – or come to accept – the way things work here.’

‘I’m not so sure.’

‘Keep a tight handle on things, Russ. On him the tightest of all. You think there’s anything I’ve missed, you come tell me right away. I don’t want any disruption to the smooth way things always work here.’

‘I know you don’t,’ said the black scientist. ‘But he’s got a proven track record. I’ve got an odd feeling, an instinct, that professionally he’ll be useful.’

‘Sufficiently useful to put up with his attitude problem?’

‘Arrogance is an irritation, not a cause for censure,’ said Benn. ‘I’m suggesting we let things run their way for a while, to discover for ourselves how good he really is.’

‘That’s what we’ve got to decide,’ agreed Newton. ‘Just how good he is.’

‘And how amenable he can be made to commercial reality,’ came in Benn, on a familiar cue.

It was Richard Parnell’s first ever commercial-firm seminar and even though he was not looped into the internal machinations of Dubette Inc., he was conscious of a frisson ruffling the faint strands of the Spider’s Web. It was, however, peripheral to his establishing himself in his new, inner-circle surroundings, which, coincidentally, on the day of the seminar, he finally completed. To achieve his self-imposed deadline, Parnell got to his section by six to supervise the technicians’ last installations, and was fully set up, with time for an unhurried breakfast of an egg-topped corned beef hash. He saw Rebecca Lang’s approach from some way off. The nameplated laboratory coat was replaced by a dark grey business suit which, by the severity of its cut, showed off an even more attractive figure than he’d imagined. There was more makeup, too, mascara and eye shadow: Parnell preferred her without either.

He smiled and said: ‘Hi again. What did you win?’

She didn’t reply, stopping to look down at him, as she had the day of the supposed bet. ‘No one told you? Bastards!’

‘Told me what?’

‘Grant’s addressing us. He always does.’

‘I was told.’

‘There’s a dress code. He likes formality.’

Parnell looked down at his sweatshirt, jeans and loafers before coming back up to her. ‘You are joking, aren’t you – about it being important how we’re dressed?’

‘No.’

‘I think it’s funny, even if you don’t. Anything that stupid has got to be funny.’

‘I don’t think it’s funny.’

‘I’ll hide myself in the crowd,’ promised Parnell.