The Second Cure Read online

  Dishes washed, table laid for the morning’s breakfast, Winnie was finally ready for bed. She’d broken one plate and chipped a cup, and was quietly furious at herself. She knew, though, that her greater fury was at her daughter. So rude, so mocking, so lacking in respect. She would never have behaved like that over dinner when Hector was still alive. Brigid was always slightly intimidated by her father, ‘the Bishop’ as she took to calling him in her teenage years, sardonically, warily. A single look from him would silence her. And Winnie, for that matter.

  And her own reaction. The first time Brigid had visited in ages and what does Winnie do? Insults her in front of Charlie. Would her daughter ever accept another invitation? She had felt a rush of glee at telling Brigid off, but that lasted as long as the trifle.

  Then the embarrassment when Charlie had realised Brigid would be staying in a hotel in the city rather than in her mother’s spare room. She had quite reasonably assumed that Brigid, who had brought her overnight bag, would take advantage of the opportunity to spend time with Winnie. Like a normal family. Mother and daughter were mute – mortification silencing Winnie, defiance setting Brigid’s mouth in a closed line of lip – and it fell to Richard, as it so often did, to smooth the moment. ‘Easier for Brigid to get to early morning meetings if she’s already in the city.’ He made no mention of his sister never having once slept in her childhood home since she fled at seventeen. She felt dreadful about not explaining to Charlie the history and could see the confusion on her face. They could talk easily about so much, but Winnie could scarcely acknowledge even to herself her implicit support of her husband’s intolerance.

  Winnie brushed her hair too hard in front of the bathroom mirror. The worst part was the hurt. The deliberate use of words as a weapon. There were times when she tried to excuse her daughter, imagining that it was mere thoughtlessness, that Brigid was unaware of the harm she caused, but Winnie couldn’t convince herself of that for long.

  She often wondered how Brigid herself rationalised it. Her much-vaunted moral compass (You don’t need God to be good, Mum …), her left-wing politics, her vegetarianism, her activism: all that compassion vanished when it came to the woman who had surrendered her life for her family, who had always done what she’d thought best for them. Brigid had a shard of ice inside her heart, the part that was supposed to love her mother.

  Somewhere, Winnie had heard it suggested that daughters never really come to see their mothers as real people with feelings, with a history, with an interior life, until the daughter herself becomes a mother. It had certainly been the case with her and her own mother. The arrival of baby Richard had opened a level of communication and understanding that disarmed and charmed them both.

  Brigid and Winnie still seemed tied together in the same dynamic of a decade before: a dance of dependence and rebellion. Brigid had retained the dismissive impatience and judgement of adolescence, as well as the childhood need for approval. Perhaps they were destined for this never to change; Brigid wouldn’t be having any children to remedy her perspective. She would never give Winnie a grandchild, obviously. And nor would Richard. He’d as good as said so when he and Charlie had bought the puppy.

  But maybe Winnie deserved it all.

  She knelt by the side of the bed, folded her hands, closed her eyes and spoke the familiar words.

  ‘Our father in heaven,

  hallowed be your name

  your kingdom come

  your will be done,

  on Earth as it is in Heaven.

  Give us today our daily bread.

  Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.

  Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil.

  For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours now and forever.

  Amen.’

  The words were coming out automatically and her heart couldn’t connect with them. She tried again.

  ‘Our father in heaven,

  hallowed be your name …’

  They were words, only words. No meaning, no depth. Nothing.

  A tear crept onto her cheek, and she felt it travel down to her chin, then drop to her thigh.

  Nothing.

  8.

  The trouble with travelling by motorbike with Richard was that there was no opportunity to talk on the way home. Charlie wanted to dissect the evening with him, talk about his mother, her dead cat and her garden, ask about Brigid’s relationship with her – what was the history there? – and get Richard’s take on the discussion about science and objectivity. She’d hoped he might have defended her from Brigid’s rant. Maybe he was used to her bluntness, but Charlie was not. She hated confrontation.

  And, of course, she wanted to talk about him having the brain scan.

  Once they reached the motorway, heading north, the darkness of the moonless night wrapped around them. Abruptly, the city gave way to bushland on either side. Traffic was light, and soon they veered off the motorway at Berowra, skirted the township and then rode along the winding Old Pacific Highway towards Cowan, set in the dense forest of Muogamarra.

  At the end of Alberta Avenue, near the brick box of the rural fire station, the bike’s headlights caught the memorial of flowers and photos that were daily attached to the telegraph pole. Every suburb, every town had at least one, a place that had sprung up to commemorate the cats. Many were well tended, but others looked tattered, their presence an eyesore that no one dared remove. Some local councils had initially tried to ban them, but the reaction was fierce and they capitulated. They were nothing in number compared with the legions of memorial sites online, however. The standing joke when the cats starting dying was that it would free up terabits of bandwidth as traffic of cat photos ceased. Instead, cat sites, chat groups, forums, graphics and animations were now threatening online porn as the internet’s main resource. Another booming industry, along with taxidermy, thanks to the genetic mutation Charlie was beginning to think of as ‘hers‘.

  As Richard unlocked the front door, they could hear the scratching against the wood.

  ‘He’s going to dig his way through there one day,’ said Charlie.

  ‘I hope we never have to sell the place,’ said Richard. ‘I’ll have to replace a few doorframes first.’

  Goblin burst through the opened door, tongue lolling and flapping against their hands, tail thwacking against their legs.

  ‘Hello, boy!’ Richard scratched his nape, fingers deep in the soft, red fur. Then Goblin turned to Charlie, demanding the same, and she obliged.

  ‘Want to do a wee?’ she asked the dog, who answered by galloping off into the night.

  In the kitchen, Charlie dumped her bag as Richard drank juice from a carton, standing in front of the open fridge. She saw he’d left his lunch dishes in the sink, soap bubbles dissipated, the water cold. He’d been interrupted mid-wash, perhaps by an idea, a cadence or a hue. But at least he’d started them. That was an improvement. And she was restraining herself from commenting. That was an improvement, too.

  He caught her looking at the dishes. ‘Oh, shit, I’m sorry. I completely forgot. I’ll do them before we go to bed, okay?’

  ‘Thanks. Glass of wine?’ She held up a bottle of red.

  ‘No, I’m thinking I might do some work. Is that okay?’ The muse tended to visit Richard at the oddest of hours and Charlie had learnt to accept it.

  ‘Sure. Listen, is your mum okay? She seemed down, even before the thing with Brigid.’

  ‘She seemed okay to me. Happy to see you, as usual.’

  ‘I don’t know. Something’s wrong.’

  ‘You’re so good to her.’

  ‘I like her. It’s not hard to be.’

  She could see he was itching to get upstairs and get to work. While she wanted to talk with him, continue the conversation about him seeing a neurologist, she decided to save it for tomorrow and he poured herself the glass of wine she’d been thinking about since they had arrived at Winnie’s.

  He went upstair
s to the attic. Charlie kicked off her shoes and carried her wineglass out to the back verandah, where she sat on her green wicker rocking chair. Goblin padded through the back door, circled three times and flopped at her feet. Charlie dropped her hand to the dog’s ear and fondled it, and he expressed his gratitude with a single thump of his tail. Poor dog’s feeling the heat as much as the rest of us, thought Charlie.

  As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, the bush remained invisible, no cloud present to bounce back the light of the city. On moonlit nights she could see down to Bujwa Bay, a tucked-away pocket of the river that ran into the vast Hawkesbury and out into the Pacific Ocean. But tonight there was no moon, and the stars were sharp against the night, the Milky Way looking like the smear of cream its name suggested. From the pond below she could hear the knock-on-wood call of a striped marsh frog and from across the valley was the two-toned hoot of a solitary boobook. Crickets and the metallic ting of microbats. There was no breeze.

  Then a CD started playing upstairs. Richard must be painting, not composing. It was a piece he’d played her before, something by Benjamin Britten. ‘Serenade for Horn, Tenor and Strings’. Or was it ‘Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings’? It didn’t sound much like a serenade to Charlie, but then, ‘serenade’ probably meant something different from her vernacular understanding of the word. It was a collection of songs, and the one he was playing she recognised because it was the setting of a poem by Blake she’d learnt at high school. They’d each had to learn a poem by heart, and she’d chosen it because it was short. No colts of Old Regret for her.

  It began with low, repetitive notes on the strings, with a deep plucked sound from the cello. Then the horn came in, a slow, haunting call that escalated into a harsh, anguished cry. It faded away and the words emerged.

  O Rose, thou art sick.

  The invisible worm,

  That flies in the night

  In the howling storm:

  Has found out thy bed

  Of crimson joy:

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy.

  Abruptly, cicadas began rasping, starting in the south and moving in a sweep through the bush before her. The wave would reach a tree, stimulating its residents to take up the cry, until the whole valley had joined in. It grew so loud that the music from the attic could no longer be heard. Charlie looked at Goblin, who slept without his ears even pricking. Perhaps cattle dogs, with their long Australian ancestry and dash of dingo blood, had learnt that cicadas weren’t something to eat or fear, and so ignored them. As the volume of the insects peaked, it was on the edge of hurting Charlie’s ears. Surely a dog’s sensitive ears must be affected even more.

  Then the stridency eased and, tree by tree, the cicadas fell silent. The music from above returned. Richard must have had the track on repeat for the tenor was starting to sing. He was doing it again, she realised. He was painting this song, playing it over and over so he could capture its colour.

  O Rose, thou art sick …

  Charlie hadn’t known what the words were about in high school, and still didn’t. As a biologist, she thought wryly, she knew it wasn’t really about a worm. Worms can’t fly. Was it about sex? Or a sexually transmitted disease? Or jealousy?

  She felt a chill of anxiety, goose bumps on her forearms, despite the heat of the night.

  Things were not right.

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy.

  At this point in my argument, I’m frequently accused of biological determinism, or, as that quaint expression once had it, sociobiology.

  This fails to recognise a fundamental aspect of biology and human behaviour: it is not fixed. That doesn’t mean the opposite – that we are entirely products of our environment. One of the great fascinations of this field is the extent to which these brain differences are innate and heritable, and how much they’re the result of environmental factors. Like most aspects of biology, it’s both, and it’s interactive. (Asking if it’s ‘nature or nurture’ is quite simply asking the wrong question.)

  People change their minds. Minds are the product of biological processes. We can change our minds because of neuronal plasticity. Even the most deeply held ‘moral’ positions can alter as a result of environment.

  You see it in, say, homophobia. Someone brought up to see gays and lesbians as ‘sick’ and ‘wicked’ literally feels disgust when confronted by them in a purely amygdalan response. But when they think it through, bringing reason to bear, and they recognise how irrational that is, they begin by having an intellectual acceptance of gay sex, and it is ultimately followed by an emotional acceptance. The disgust literally disappears. That’s a brain change.

  It’s also why we become more progressive in our political stances when we live in cities and when mass migration intrudes into mono-cultures. We are confronted by difference, constantly, and the visceral (amygdaloid) response to it is overcome by the rational recognition that the difference isn’t actually a threat.

  Zinn, Shadrack, The Neuroscience of Belief: politics, gods and perception, L Bell Press, New York, 2010

  9.

  In the years before her fall, Charlie Zinn’s conception of the practice of science was unremarkable. She saw a scientist’s work as one of increments, the slow accretion of data, a process of occasional insights and scarcer inspiration. Most jobbing biologists were pleased to add small solutions to the puzzle of life’s mechanisms. To gain the esteem of colleagues for contributing a number of crucial parts to the greater whole was an element of the pleasure.

  For a researcher to attain a level of approbation beyond that, of the sort of fame that put a scientist’s name in the media and the public realm, typically resulted from the making of connections that were often initially obscure and even absurd to others. Using the same data, the same evidence that was available to all, such practitioners applied an imagination that enabled the inversion of perspective or the unexpected connection of disparate elements that led to true discovery. As time passed, the truth would become obvious to all, although frequently not without pain to its proponents. Such innovation of theory required an openness to inspiration that Charlie, who was frank about her own limitations, considered beyond her. She was no Darwin or Wallace, no Feynman or Hawking, and she had accepted that. Her work was useful, however, and her early career, despite the inevitable setbacks due to academic politics and bureaucratic whimsy, had travelled adequately.

  Yet growing acclaim and regard were becoming hers, not because she’d sought them, or positioned her work to facilitate their delivery. Rather than her insight chasing down a problem, the problem had come to her, and mere chance had made her precisely the person to unravel it.

  This serendipity made her feel a fraud, as though any moment, someone would see through her and denounce her. It wasn’t a new sensation. She’d felt it when she found herself in the top class at the beginning of high school. It must have been a mistake, surely. A stellar result in the VCE, the university medal with her first-class honours, and, later, her PhD: none of them felt real. She couldn’t reconcile the external evidence of her aptitude with the doubts within. Her sense of inadequacy manifested in her dreams: nightmares about being dragged out of a lecture she was giving because it had been discovered that she failed history in Year Eight (which she hadn’t, of course) and every qualification she’d gained subsequently had been withdrawn. There was a name for it, she knew. Imposter Syndrome. And the famous Dunning– Kruger study, showing that people who were incompetent and ignorant tended to overestimate their abilities and believe in their illusory superiority, also demonstrated that people at the other end of the bell curve often thought the opposite, genuinely assessing themselves to be less able than they actually were. But knowing that it was common for high achievers to feel this sense of self-doubt wasn’t enough to convince her that it was unjustified in her case. She heartily believed that luck had had a disturbingly large role in all this and she strove to suppress her
constant low-level anxiety. The responsibility that came with her new power and fame felt like a burden, not a prize.

  (And yet, and yet. She also found herself revelling in the recognition, unwilling to subdue the quiet thrill when another radio presenter or pop-science magazine requested an interview.)

  She and Juliette would each give a section of the talk: Charlie, an introduction, the background of the parasite’s origin and spread, and the analysis of the Toxoplasmosis pestis genome; and Juliette, her preliminary work on its proteome, the protein products of its genes. Both would take questions at the end. While Charlie’s nerves piled up on top of each other, Juliette was relaxed and lounging on one of the front-row seats, chatting to some of her students behind her. Charlie suspected that her colleague could give a public lecture reading out the phonebook and still wow the audience.

  She looked up to see the lecture theatre filling up already, both horrified and pleased to note it would be a good crowd. Rarely was her field of parasitology considered particularly notable, but that was before the species she’d spent years researching had mutated and shattered an entire biological family. As well as staff from the department, PhD students and a sizeable number of undergrads, there were faces Charlie didn’t recognise. Perhaps from other faculties, perhaps even from outside the university. It was a little thrilling.

  Gordon Reed, the head of the department, appeared at the entrance and made his way down the stairs to the front. As he approached her, she was struck once again by his resemblance to a small beetle. He was tiny and round, with sloping shoulders and a carapace of hair that sat on his head like a solid lump of black chiton. His features were disproportionately small for his ovoid face, arranged too closely at its centre, and he attempted to compensate for this by growing a goatee and moustache. To Charlie, that just looked as though he’d added mandibles to complete his arthropodic bearing.