Children of the Sun by Max Schaefer

Author:Max Schaefer [Schaefer, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847081155
Published: 2019-11-09T13:00:00+00:00

Old Albion

At the library, whole years of National Front News turned out to have disappeared entirely. When I enquired about them the Indian woman at the desk told me, ‘Well, don’t expect me to help you!’ She added, ‘I’m only joking,’ but was clearly discomfited, because after making a few suggestions she said, ‘If you do find them make sure you tell them an Indian helped you, so we’re not all bad.’

‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘I hope you don’t think I’m reading this stuff out of sympathy for the—’

‘No,’ she said hurriedly, ‘no, I just needed to say something.’

We were both embarrassed now, visibly, shakily so, and I ended the conversation as quickly as I could. Describing it later to Adam and Sarah, as we walked the Regent’s Canal, I kept going over her odd formulation, ‘tell them’, who they might be simultaneously obvious and baffling: did she believe that fascists had sent me to find their paper? ‘I needed to say something,’ she had explained, as if by just referring to the Front I had somehow helped it breathe.

Sarah’s completion of her PhD had made good the prospect, which she had long been nurturing, of a research post at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her team was to investigate what she glibly described as ‘the sex life of malaria’. It was led by an old colleague of her supervisor, with funding underwritten by the Gates Foundation. I felt oddly excited that my sister’s salary would be met by the world’s richest man, but Sarah was more preoccupied by her switch to a ‘mainstream’ parasite: she had a proprietorial attachment to the undistinguished trypanosome whose promastigote stage was the subject of her thesis, and was sorry to be moving on. When I suggested malaria was big money for a reason, and that no matter how small the part she played, the possible glory of an eventual vaccine would be large enough to share, she claimed that ‘her’ organism still killed several thousand people a year, and that measured by, say, dead humans per researcher, she was almost certainly losing out. Still, the job, and her consequent return to London, deserved celebration, as did the news that same week of John Tyndall’s death, so I had suggested the canal, which had long been on my list, for a Sunday walk. ‘We’ll end up in Limehouse,’ I had added, ‘so we can go to the White Swan for amateur strip night.’ That had long been on my list as well.

We started at the earliest point possible, where the canal emerges from its passage under Islington, and a gate in the road above the tunnel opens on to a path that seems to promise a secret garden: you have to part thin, dangling stalks of trees and swarming midges on the steep descent, and there’s the sudden ancestral comfort of woodsmoke from the houseboats moored below.

‘The thing is,’ I was saying, ‘when I started I thought the point was that Nicky lived this amazing double life — neo-nazi by day, homosexual by night.

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