The Heart Broke In by James Meek Read Free Book Online Page A

feel she’d been unlucky in men. She was thirty-three; her heart had been broken properly once, so that though it was mended it would always show the crack, but that was the only time. It’d been back in her twenties. She’d lived with Joel for three years while she got her doctorate in Sacramento. He followed her to the post she won in London, looked around, didn’t like the set-up and went back to the States.
    In the year after he left it seemed to her that she’d been reassigned, against her will, to serve as a container for misery. There was a cold corrosive goo that sloshed around in her and stung when she tried to move towards the light.
    That was her first year at the Centre for Parasite Control. She was a zombie technician, able to move and communicate mechanically, but not to use her senses for much more than counting, measuring and inputting data. This turned out to be exactly what the centre wanted. After twelve months, when the colour and warmth came back, she found her stock was high and her ideas were listened to. When Bec’s principal investigator Meena went on maternity leave Bec stood in for her, mentoring the post-grads, teaching and trying to break away from Meena’s obsession with parasitic worms. One day, soon after her twenty-seventh birthday, she had told her mother she was going to Papua New Guinea.
    ‘You know who else dots around the world the wayscientists do?’ said her mother. ‘Catholic priests. Three years here, two years there. You won’t find a man willing to trail around the world after you.’
    ‘I’m not looking for one of them,’ said Bec. ‘You’ve got grandchildren.’
    ‘Why do you always think I’m selfish? It’s about you.’ Her mother drew on a cigarette and took another sip of Ayurvedic tea. The packaging spoke of its potential for karmic enhancement. ‘You have to learn to accept constraints in life.’

9
    A pair of married Stanford professors, an ornithologist and an entomologist, had recruited Bec for Papua New Guinea on the strength of her paper on sexual conflict among parasites, which Ruth Nickell called
ballsy
. ‘It’s Nick
ell
,’ she told Bec on the phone. ‘I’m insects, he’s birds.’
    Her husband Franz had come across a translated paper written by a long-dead parasitologist attached to the Japanese army that invaded PNG in the Second World War. It described how a unit of military engineers building a camp in the interior remained almost immune to malaria while troops further down the valley succumbed in their hundreds. The Japanese scientist found a biting fly that fed indiscriminately on the blood of men and birds of paradise. He speculated that an unknown parasite was being transferred from the birds to the men, and that this parasite gave immunity from the parasite that caused malaria. Before he could continue his research the Japanese were attacked and driven from the island. The scientist lost his photographs, drawings and the wooden slide case carrying the soldiers’ blood samples in the chaos of retreat.
    Bec flew to Australia and from there to Lae. Ruth picked her up and drove her to the bungalow in the little townwhere they’d set up a research base. She drove fast, overtaking buses and trucks, bashing the horn, pumping the lights with her scrawny hands. She questioned Bec about life and family in an amiable, new-roommates way, and when Bec mentioned the death of her father, Ruth nodded and responded with the story of their grown-up son and how he was in trouble with the authorities, as if to say
Oh yes, we have one of those
. Ruth turned from the road to Bec and back, and her ponytail, her breasts, untethered under a baggy t-shirt, and the ankh on a cord round her neck swung to and fro.
    ‘My husband can be kind of cranky, but don’t underestimate the depth of his intellect,’ said Ruth. ‘He’s also great in bed.’ She gave a squeaky laugh.
    On the edge of their destination they passed a huddle of shacks made of bamboo and