The End of Men(44)
“Nell, it’s Lisa.”
“Lisa, I’ve told you before. I can see who it is on my phone, we’ve had caller ID since the nineties.”
“What do you want me to say? Hello, and then just launch in to it? Have you seen the news?”
“I’ve been in the lab all day. I just stepped out to get lunch.”
“George Kitchen, Elizabeth Cooper and some geneticist called Amaya Sharvani have done it. They’ve identified the gene sequence responsible for female immunity.”
“Of course Amaya Sharvani would have something to do with this.”
I’ve never heard of her. “Is she good?”
“Only thirty-six, she’s phenomenal. She had four papers out last year, does amazing work at Great Ormond Street. Yeah, she’s good. Never mind that, how did she figure it out?”
“Twins, one fraternal with an immune father and only one twin immune. One set of identicals both immune with a dad who wasn’t. Partly luck she had those sets of patients. Then they homed in on the genes, did the sequencing, and here we are. The entire world is floored by their genius.”
“Now now, Leese. I can hear a familiar green tinge to your voice.” I can tell Nell is smiling. She loves making fun of me. It’s really annoying.
“I’m not jealous.”
“And yet, you’re the one to bring up that word.”
“I’m thrilled they’ve made this discovery.”
“But you wish it had been you.”
I laugh. “And don’t you?”
Nell sighs. “Of course. The difference is that I can accept there might be people in the world who are more intelligent than I am, Lisa. A concept you seem to struggle with.”
I’d like to think I’m handling this conversation with the dignity and grace befitting a professor of an esteemed institution but instinctively I let out a kind of growl that makes me think of my dad when my mom would turn the TV off.
“We need to meet,” Nell says briskly. “Read the materials, talk them through, figure out where we go next.”
“Already on my way over to you.”
For the first time in a few days, I feel excited. I would never let my staff know, but this work is a grind with no letup and, despite popular belief, I’m only human. I get tired and overwhelmed and just want it all to be over. I don’t show it. Leaders need to be strong, and no one can accuse me of being weak. But I needed this today. We needed this boost, badly. This will speed up our research tenfold.
Thank you, George and Elizabeth and Amaya. If I was in their position I probably wouldn’t have released this information. But they’re not me and I can benefit from it, and that means we’ll have a vaccine quicker and men can stop dying. We’re reaching a critical point in population loss the world over. We’re past a point of return but we’re not yet past the point of return. There are still enough young women of child-bearing age to have a hope in hell of population recovery. I sigh, and text my assistant to get me another Red Bull. The work is only just beginning.
SURVIVAL
MORVEN
A small farm next to the Cairngorms National Park, the Independent Republic of Scotland
Day 224
It’s been 161 days since I saw my son. I know he’s alive from the crackly call I get from his walkie-talkie every morning, but that’s the only contact we have. When it’s dark and I’m washing the dishes in the kitchen, I can see the faint glow from his hut eight hundred meters away. It takes everything I have not to run the short distance and scoop him into my arms.
Cameron—my patient, frustrated husband—has been asking for months when we’re going to let Jamie come back. “When we know it’s safe,” I say. He’s becoming increasingly resentful of my fear. We’ve been together twenty-five years; I know him like the back of my hand and I know he’s going to snap soon. But he’s always been the more reckless of the two of us. None of the boys seem to be sick, this is true. Cameron hasn’t gotten sick.
But we don’t know anything about these boys or the virus. We don’t know how long you can be asymptomatic. What if one of them has it lurking in his system or there’s a bit of it in one of the tents? The stakes are so high, the regret would kill me if Jamie died all because we were impatient. Cameron says I’m a conspiracy theorist because I don’t believe the government when they say men are asymptomatic for two days. I don’t believe it. They’ve done everything wrong. They didn’t believe Amanda Maclean, they haven’t found a vaccine, they barely did anything to stop the spread of the virus. I just don’t believe them.
The other boys are playing football on the makeshift pitch. The whoops and hollers of seventy-eight teenage boys used to bring a smile to my face. I would revel in the sounds of joy when outside the safe confines of our space here, there is only danger and sadness. But that was almost six months ago. Now, the resentment is killing me.
If I was a different kind of woman, I would maybe acknowledge that this is traumatizing and that my brain feels frayed and close to collapse. As it is, I drink two bottles of our stashed wine once every few weeks and try to forget that any of this is happening. Without my son I’m struggling to function. I’m keeping other women’s sons safe and happy and well while my own son rots in loneliness a fifteen-minute walk away. The boys are wonderful. It’s not their fault that any of this is happening. They all look so young, especially when they first arrived. Fear takes the promise of adulthood out of a child’s face, I find. These big teenage lads, nearly six feet, away from their mums, scared senseless, unsure if they’d ever see their dads again, looked so young. Gangly and insubstantial.