Harry Bingham - Sweet Talking Money

Bryn was blurry with illness, tired from too much work, and disconcerted by this strange doctor. His mind felt foggy and dull. ‘Chicken?’

‘Your white cells. They’re exhausted. We need to juice them up.’

Rudely shoving Bryn aside, she began working with the glass tray. She’d scraped her dull, sandy-coloured hair away from her face and secured it at the back with a rubber band plucked from some packaging discarded in the wastebin. Unconscious of her appearance, unconscious of anything except her work, she took a few drops from each compartment, dropped them on to a slide, and studied the slide under the microscope. She took about five or six minutes, working in silence, with little tuts of dissatisfaction emerging as she failed to find what she was looking for. Bryn looked around for somewhere to sit. The chairs were mostly either inaccessible or piled high with research documents, so he eventually settled for a stack of paper tottering somewhere in the darkness. He watched Cameron working intently in her pool of lamplight, and as he watched, he felt the ache from the punch settle down and begin to mingle with his other aches, disappearing into them, making itself at home. Eventually, with the eleventh compartment tested, she looked up.

‘We’ve got something. Not a perfect match, but the best I’ve found.’ She looked him up and down, like a butcher at a cow. ‘And you’re not in such awful shape. It shouldn’t take too much.’

She shoved him across to the microscope, as she went over to the larger of her two fridges. In the round image picked out by the lens, Bryn saw the same thing as before, only massively different. The lethargic white blood cells had gone hyperactive. As soon as they located a blue protein strand, they enveloped it and gobbled it, then went charging off to look for the next one. Even as Bryn watched, the microscope slide cleared of all invaders.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘And what if that had been AIDS, not chicken?’

But Wilde wasn’t listening. Her hands pattered down rows of glass bottles in the fridge, then stopped and pulled out a beaker. Next she found a syringe which looked like a church steeple joined to a zeppelin, and began to fill it.

‘What’s that?’ asked Bryn.

‘Same solution as I used to beef up your white cells under the scope. It’s a mix of nutritional factors. Fuel for blood cells.’

She swabbed his arm with alcohol, and Bryn felt the familiar cooling sensation.

‘Is this what you do? Your research area, I mean?’

‘Huh? This? God, no,’ she said, waving her needle. ‘This is crude, painfully, painfully crude.’ The alcohol had evaporated away, and Cameron wiped the vein a second time. The syringe looked bigger close up, huge in fact. ‘With real diseases, serious disease, you actually need to reprogram the white blood cells, literally write strings of program code to remind them how to do the job.’ She poked at his vein to make it stand out. ‘Not silicon chips, obviously, the body needs chemical code. Amino acids. Peptides.’ She levelled the syringe. ‘Little prick.’

‘I have not,’ muttered Bryn, trying not to watch.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Nothing. Forget it.’

Dr Wilde had found the vein without difficulty, and with calm expertise, slowly and smoothly injected the solution into his arm. It was almost totally painless.

‘Done,’ she said. She pulled the rubber band from her hair and shook it into its previous uncombed mess.

‘Thanks. Like I say, I have a full day of meetings tomorrow, so anything which helps …’

‘Tomorrow?’ She snorted out through her nose, possibly her version of a laugh. ‘You’ll need to cancel.’

‘I can’t cancel. That’s the point. That’s why I came.’

She shrugged. It wasn’t her problem. ‘Try to eat properly while you’re recovering. That means no caffeine, no alcohol, no sugar, no dairy, nothing processed, not much fat, no additives, no allergens.’

‘Grass. I’ll eat grass.’

‘Organic, where possible. Thirty bucks for the injection, please. You can give me another twenty for the consultation, if you feel like supporting my research.’

Bryn rolled down his sleeve and groped for his jacket.

‘It’s nice to work on humans every now and then,’ she continued. ‘Mostly I just stick needles into rats.’ Her words came out in grunts as she cleared her microscope bench of the litter. The compartmented tray, now rejoicing in twelve drops of finest Welsh blood, she waved in the air. ‘Human blood. A prized commodity. Can I keep it?’

‘Be my guest. Punching people is part of your research? Or was that just for fun?’

Wilde was nonplussed. She didn’t understand jokes, it seemed.

‘It wasn’t research. I just wanted to explain … Sorry.’

Bryn pulled a hundred bucks from his wallet. ‘Can you give me a receipt?’ He needed it to claim his expenses. She looked vacantly round the mountainous paper landscape in its inky darkness and pools of light. She didn’t do receipts. ‘OK. Don’t worry. Just keep it. Good luck with your research.’

‘Thanks. Sorry I hurt you.’

‘That’s OK. Not to worry. It’s fine. Thank you.’

‘Here, have this,’ she said abruptly. She found a business card and scribbled on the back of it, a hundred dollars, received with thanks. He took it and caught a taxi back to his hotel downtown, musing on what he’d witnessed.

He’d seen blood cells recharged and reinvigorated. He’d seen blood cells destroying invaders like Schwarzenegger on speed. He’d seen a failing immune system rebuilt under the microscope.

This time, of course, the invaders had been chicken, the magic show no more than a party trick. But if, as she’d implied, Dr Wilde could repeat her trick with serious illness, then it wasn’t just a trick she’d discovered. It was the Holy Grail.

Bryn had as much intention of spending the next day in his hotel room as he had of giving all his money away to charity, but there are times when things move beyond your control. By eleven p.m. his temperature had shot up to 105°F and hung there all night. Shivering underneath a mountain of duvets, he cancelled everything he’d had arranged and waited for the crisis to pass. By evening, his temperature had come down, his chest had cleared, and his appetite returned with a vengeance. Other than a little temporary weakness, he was as fit as a fiddle and ready for action.

Making a rapid check of flight times, he made a dash for the airport through rainswept streets, catching the last overnight flight into London. He slept well through the journey, woke sufficiently refreshed to manage a king-sized breakfast, and was first off the plane on arrival.

Strictly speaking he should have gone straight into work, but it was a grey and chilly morning at a grey and ugly Heathrow, and he found himself asking the cabbie to take him home instead. He’d shower, shave and have a second full-size breakfast, before going into the office.

And there was another motivation. For several years his marriage had been poor, possibly even collapsing. He and his wife, Cecily, had their fair share of relationship problems, of course, but on top of that, theirs was a banker’s marriage. It wasn’t that Bryn cared about his career and Cecily didn’t. On the contrary, she had been brought up to consider money to be more important than oxygen. But there was a cost: work came first, the marriage came second. Out of their last fifty-two weekends, only five had been completely free of work.

And so a stop for breakfast and a shower wouldn’t just be pleasant, it would be Bryn’s way of showing Cecily that she still mattered to him, a small step towards reconstructing their relationship. He’d been taking a lot of such steps recently, hopeful that they were clawing their way towards something better.