The Heart Broke In by James Meek Read Free Book Online

Midge.
    ‘You’ve got a lot of testosterone in you for a small man. Keep your dirty paws off her.’
    ‘She’s not my type. I only like the skinny ones. Is she free, then?’
    ‘She’s still seeing Val Oatman.’
    ‘Do you think Val Oatman was crazy and made his newspaper crazy, or did it make him crazy when he started editing a crazy newspaper?’
    ‘He’s not right for her,’ said Ritchie. ‘She doesn’t know about him.’
    ‘I know what Val Oatman does. I can’t say the same about Bec. Can you?’ said Midge.
    ‘She’s my sister.’
    ‘But she moved into a world you don’t know anything about.’
    ‘I know what she does.’
    ‘Really? Tiny creatures swimming in her blood, birds of paradise? Could you explain it to me right now?’
    Ritchie laughed and changed the subject.

8
    Two days earlier the newspaper editor Val Oatman had proposed to Bec and she, taken by surprise, said yes. He gave her a gold ring with a diamond surrounded by smaller rubies and she took it between the thumb and much-pricked fingertips of her left hand and stared at it as if she were admiring it before giving it back. He had to tell her to put it on, and she did. It was a horrible feeling as the gold band slid over the skin of her knuckle. He told her fondly that it had been his dead wife’s engagement ring.
    They didn’t stay together that night. They agreed to meet the next day. When she got home to her flat in Kentish Town Bec took the ring off, put it in an envelope and after much dithering over safe places stowed the envelope in the freezer compartment of her fridge. She didn’t tell anyone she was engaged. She felt no happiness, only a jangled feeling, as if she’d been in an accident.
    Missing his wife, Val had been asking Bec for kindness, and she’d been giving it. He asked her to sleep with him and she did. It probably made him think she was in love with him, she supposed. I didn’t say that, she thought. I did what he asked me to do.
    It seemed to her that scientists ought to be able to keeptrack of numbers such as how many times they’d slept with someone, yet she’d lost count like a small child. After three, all numbers were ‘lots’. As long as she kept the number in her head, she’d been able to hold Val at a distance; she’d forgotten it, and the man she’d slept with a few times was now her fiancé.
    In a series of papers in scientific journals, Bec had proposed a new way to ward off malaria. Her peers said it was unsafe. One called it ‘baroque’. The version she was being allowed to trial in Tanzania was a remnant of what she’d wanted to do. Val said he wanted to visit her while she was there and she’d been able to let it pass without them deciding. When he reminded her a few days later she had to say ‘Of course.’ She didn’t want him to come but she didn’t have the courage to tell him not to. They were supposed to meet in London the Sunday before she left and there was no need for Bec to put in extra hours but when Val called to arrange it she suddenly craved to be with chicken blood and microscopes in the clinical alcohol smell of the lab. She yearned to toil until she fell unconscious. The thought made her stomach flutter.
    ‘I can’t meet up,’ she told Val. ‘We haven’t made enough haemoproteus.’
    ‘I know what that is,’ said Val. He said he could see her on Monday.
    ‘I’m having dinner with Ritchie and my mother.’
    ‘I could join you.’
    ‘It’s a family thing.’
    ‘I’m going to be part of your family.’
    ‘About the man who killed Dad.’
    ‘What did your mother say when you told her we were getting married?’
    ‘I haven’t told anyone yet.’
    She heard Val breathing. He said: ‘Tuesday night, then. Before you go.’
    ‘I’ll be happier once I’ve cultured a few billion parasites.’
    ‘You work too hard,’ said Val, and when she didn’t answer, he said: ‘As long as it’s that. I’ll call you. On your landline at work.’
    Bec didn’t