Sister полностью

“And I’ve got you support stockings, because my friend who’s a doctor says you must be careful not to get a thrombosis, zakrzepica,” I said, translating the last word into Polish, which I’d looked up before. I couldn’t read her expression and was worried I was imposing.

“I don’t have to stay with your family. But I really don’t think you should go that far with a new baby on your own.”

She kissed me. I realized that, despite everything, this was the first time I’d seen her cry.

I have told Mr. Wright about Mitch’s notes.

“I thought that was another reason poor single girls were being chosen—they were less likely to be believed.”

The sunshine has made me feel sleepier rather than waking me up. I finish telling Mr. Wright about Mitch’s notes.

It’s now an effort to be coherent.

“Then I gave Kasia tickets to Poland, and she cried.”

My intellect is too unfocused now to decide what is relevant.

“That night I realized, properly, how brave she’d been. I’d thought her naive and immature, but she’s actually really courageous and I should have seen that when she stood up for me with Mitch, knowing that she’d be hit for it.”

The bruises on her face and the welts on her arms were clear enough badges of courage. But so too was her smiling and dancing in the face of whatever was thrown at her. Like you, she has the gift of finding happiness in small things. She pans life for gold and finds it daily.

And so what if, like you, she loses things? It’s no more a sign of immaturity than my knowledge of where my possessions are is a sign of my adulthood. And imagine acquiring a new language and only learning the words to describe a wonderful world, refusing to know the words for a bleak one and in doing so linguistically shaping the world that you inhabit. I don’t think that’s naive, but fantastically optimistic.

The next morning I knew that I had to tell her what was going on. Who was I to think that after what happened to you, I could look after another person?

“I was going to tell her, but she was already on her mobile phoning half of Poland to tell them about bringing the baby to see them. And then I got another e-mail from Professor Rosen, asking to meet me. Kasia was still chatting to her family when I left the flat.”

I met Professor Rosen, at his suggestion, at the entrance to the Chrom-Med building, which was bustling despite it being Sunday. I was expecting him to escort me to his office, but instead he led me to his car. We got in and he locked the doors. The demonstrators were still there—a distance away—and I couldn’t hear their chants.

Professor Rosen was trying to sound calm but there was a shake in his voice that he couldn’t control. “An active virus vector has been ordered under my cystic fibrosis trial number at St. Anne’s.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Either there’s been a monumental cock-up,” he said, and I thought that he never used words like cock-up, that this was as extreme as his language would get, “or a different gene is being tested out at St. Anne’s, one that needs an active virus vector, and my cystic fibrosis trial is being used as a cover.”

“The cystic fibrosis trial has been hijacked?”

“Maybe, yes. If you want to be melodramatic about it.”

He was trying to belittle what was happening but couldn’t quite pull it off.

“For what?” I asked.

“My guess is that, if an illegal trial is happening, it is for genetic enhancement, which in the UK is illegal to test on humans.”

“What kind of enhancement?”

“I don’t know. Blue eyes, high IQ, big muscles. The list of absurdity goes on. But whatever gene it is, it needs an active virus vector to transport it.”

He was talking as a scientist, in facts, but beneath the words his emotion was clear. He was livid.

“Do you know who is giving the injection for the CF gene therapy at St. Anne’s?” I asked.

“I don’t have access to that type of information. They keep us very much inside our own pigeonholes at Chrom-Med. It’s not like a university, no cross-pollination of ideas or information. So no, I don’t know the doctor’s name. But if I were him or her, I would administer the genetic treatment for cystic fibrosis to fetuses who genuinely had CF and at the same time test the illicit gene. But maybe whoever it is became careless, or there just weren’t enough patients.” He broke off and I saw the anger and hurt in him. “Someone is trying to make babies even more perfect in some way. But healthy is already perfect. Healthy is already perfect.” I saw that he was shaking.

I wondered then if you’d found out about the hijacked trial—and the hijacker’s identity. Was that why you’d been murdered?

“You must tell the police.”

He shook his head, not meeting my eyes.

“But you have to tell them.”

“It’s still just conjecture.”

“My sister and her baby are dead.”