Read Online The Heart Broke In by James Meek - Free Book Online

slide ready, put it on the microscope stage and passed out. When she woke up, hours had gone by. Her head had cleared and she was hungry and thirsty. She made a jug of coffee and sat down at the microscope.
    On the third field, she saw that one of her red blood cells had been invaded by an alien creature. The parasite was smaller than the plasmodium that caused the local version of malaria. It looked like a species of haemoproteus, but not one she could identify.
    The fever didn’t come back. Bec flew to Australia for tests and consultations with other scientists and between them they worked out that she’d been infected with an unknown species of haemoproteus; that the parasite seemed to have entered a dormant stage and become a hypnozoite. The doctors suggested drugs to flush the parasite from her system. She declined.
    Bec sent details of her find out to committees and one evening she got an email with the last approval she’d been looking for. She called her mother and told her that she’d discovered a new species.
    ‘That’s wonderful, darling,’ said her mother. ‘What does it look like?’
    ‘You can’t see it with the naked eye,’ said Bec.
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘You have to have a microscope.’
    ‘I saw a documentary about PNG last week. They found a new kind of tree kangaroo. It was adorable. It had fruit in itspaws and it was eating it, like a little boy with an apple. Perhaps you’ll find something like that.’
    ‘I named it after Dad,’ said Bec. ‘It’s going to be called
Haemoproteus gregi.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Haemoproteus gregi
. As in Greg. As in Dad.’
    ‘Your father was only really interested in dogs and horses. And fish, I suppose.’
    Bec bit her lip. ‘They don’t find a new species of invasive parasite every day,’ she said.
    ‘You named a parasite after your father?’ said her mother. ‘How could you do such a horrible thing?’
    Bec had stopped taking malaria pills, and let her wrists, ankles and neck lie bare in the evening. The mosquitoes feasted on her, and she didn’t get malaria.
    When Bec came back to London, the centre wasn’t sure what to do with her. They obtained money for her, an important-sounding title and a lab of her own, but told her they couldn’t support her infecting healthy people – young children! – with one live parasite in order to ward off another. To show how effective
gregi
was, Bec sat in the centre’s secure, windowless insectarium and let herself be bitten and infected with the more vicious African version of malaria. It caused her nothing more than a runny nose, but she only made the director angry.
    ‘You’re lucky not to be in permanent quarantine,’ Maddie, the director, told Bec. ‘You have no idea what that thing’s capable of.’
    ‘Stopping malaria,’ said Bec.
    ‘Look what it’s doing to your eyes.’
    ‘They go a bit blurry once in a while. It’s nothing.’
    Maddie told her it was ethically, politically and medically unacceptable, and Bec was obliged to take a different route, to create a vaccine out of parasites that had been carefully killed. It was this, six years later, her group was testing in Africa. It half-worked, but then so did many things.
    Bec had met Val after the newspaper he edited interviewed her about her malaria work. She was flattered by the article the reporter wrote about her and her group; the journalist got it more or less right, even if he exaggerated what they might achieve and the number of lives they might save. She liked herself in the photo they took. The smiling Bec in the picture seemed like a smarter, prettier twin, the one Bec could never be as good as but who’d do her best to help her sister along.
    She bought the paper edition and as she turned its pages, looking for the story, she skimmed the other articles. They made her feel she was in a room full of bitter, frightened people who reckoned the world had been going to hell for ever and it was somebody else’s fault.
    When she got an