A few nights after I tell Rachel about the pill, she gets home from work to find me and Wilf in the living room.
‘I thought it might be useful for us all to sit down and talk,’ I say, as she pauses in the doorway.
She looks doubtful about this, probably because Wilf’s usually a man of few words. He even declined to be my best man because he didn’t think he’d have enough to say in a speech.
The flat smells of toast, and the coffee table is covered with empty mugs and piles of paper printouts, as though we’ve been chairing a council of war. I mean, the past couple of hours have actually been something of a battle for me, on the brainpower front, as Wilf has been attempting to walk me through a paper he’s drafted on the mechanics of the pill.
Objectively speaking, his genius staggers me. The potential of this thing. What if everyone took it at, say, the age of twenty-one? How many illnesses and early deaths could be averted? How many lives transformed?
Rachel takes a seat in the armchair near the fireplace. As she does, I notice her mascara is smudged. Has she been crying?
The bank where she works in HR has recently been taken over by a bigger bank with fewer scruples, which means part of her job is now to fire a load of her colleagues and dress it up as redundancy. This, I know, is the kind of corporate savagery that keeps her awake at night. It’s got worse since she became a manager last year, which has meant daily full-body immersion into the choppy waters of office politics.
But my wife is nothing if not determined. I know without having to ask that she’s going to stick it out.
I meet her eye and mouth, ‘You okay?’
She nods, shoots me a littletalk laterwink.
I offer her tea, but she declines, removing her heels and suit jacket, twisting her loose hair into a topknot.
Wilf picks up the book I’ve been reading from the arm of the sofa.Jurassic Park. He flicks through it. ‘Interesting choice.’
He knows me too well. ‘Coincidence,’ I mumble.
Rachel frowns as if she has no idea what we’re talking about, which might feasibly be true, since she turned down my invite to come and watch a film about dinosaurs when it was released, in favour of a night drinking pisco sours with Polly and Ingrid.
Wilf dunks a biscuit into his mug of tea. ‘Right. I should say from the outset that what we discuss doesn’t leave this room.’
‘Fine,’ Rachel says. Then, ‘So, you really took this pill?’
Wilf shrugs. ‘I wouldn’t expect Josh to be my guinea pig. I had seizures and clots in mind, things like that. Look, in an ideal world the pill would have gone through more rounds of testing at this point, but time’s not on—’
I feel my stomach upturn. ‘Hang on. You took that pill for me?’
‘Yes?’ he says, through a mouthful of custard cream.
‘Can its effects be reversed?’ Rachel says.
She told me the other night, when we finally sat down to eat our cod and artichokes at getting on for midnight, that as far as she was concerned this was the point upon which there could be zero margin for error.
‘No. The pill alters the body on a cellular level. There’s no changing your mind.’
‘You say that like it’s not a big deal.’
She directs this at Wilf, but really I know she is speaking to me. To try to remind me. Because she knows that – in the absenceof fear – I would ordinarily never contemplate doing something like this.
I’ve been known to make the odd questionable decision over the years. Ignoring the warnings about our money-pit flat. Bleaching my hair for a dare that time. Strapping myself into a helicopter with that weirdo who wanted to date my mum.
But this... this is different. It’s funny, what fear can do – the logic it can assign to insanity. Pulling a trigger. Trying to win your money back from the bookies. Freezing on the spot, when in fact you need to flee.
Wilf appears to concurrently consider and reject Rachel’s statement. ‘Everyone’s scared of things they don’t understand.’
At this, I have to step in. ‘I don’t think this is necessarily a brainpower issue, mate.’
‘I agree,’ says Wilf, sipping his tea and reaching for another biscuit. ‘In fact, I was referring to the kind of knowledge commonly referred to as explicit—’
‘Sorry, but isn’t this all a bit Dolly-the-sheep?’ Rachel blurts.
