Some Rain Must Fall by Michel Faber

Author:Michel Faber
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781847674067
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 1998-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

The Gossip Cell

[A]

ED JEROME’S wife was, at most, half a dozen thrusts away from orgasm when the bedside telephone rang.

‘Don’t answer it!’ she wailed.

‘It might be our Helen,’ Ed suggested.

‘It’ll be Willie Spink,’ his wife threatened through clenched teeth.

Ed disengaged himself gently, explaining that their daughter had promised to ring some time today, to pass on the latest news about the custody battle for little Fergus.

‘Hello?’ he panted into the mouthpiece.

‘Hello! It’s Willie!’ gushed the voice at the other end of the line.

Ed’s neck thickened while the rest of him slumped somewhat.

‘I – it’s late,’ he growled. Behind him, Mrs Jerome was quietly metamorphosing from sex goddess to relationship troubleshooter.

‘Never too late for a world-changing idea, Ed,’ enthused Willie. ‘By this time next year, you and I will be millionaires and people will be eating ice creams in the Gobi desert.’

‘Ice creams in the Gobi desert?’

‘Yeah, and going back to their cup of coffee six hours later!’

‘Sounds brilliant, Willie. Call me back tomorrow afternoon, after work.’

‘But you don’t un—’

Ed hated to hang up on him like this; it was contrary to his generous nature, but, in the circumstances, it was the only way to earn points with Mrs Jerome. She was putting her bra back on, and it was a front fastener, too, which only she knew how to operate.

‘Feeling cold, love?’ he said nervously.

‘Oh, I’ve cooled down considerably,’ she remarked.

Two days later, Ed Jerome went to visit Willie at the laboratory. It wasn’t a dirty secret from Mrs Jerome: she’d given her blessing. She was not an unreasonable woman.

It would have been different if Willie Spink had been a no-hoper, a harmless crank whose discoveries existed solely in his own imagination. But Ed – and even Ed’s wife – had to admit that there was much more to Willie than that. He was a genius, and a marketable one, at that.

His essential flaw (apart from a perennial inability to understand that other people went to bed at night) was that his vision of the practical uses of his inventions diverged from that of the average citizen of Earth. He was the sort of boffin who might have discovered nuclear fission and imagined it might be useful for garbage disposal or popcorn machines. Fortunately he had never discovered anything as dangerous as nuclear fission, but he had, three years ago, developed an eczema ‘vaccine’ in tablet form: the sufferer took the tablet, whose active ingredient was then sweated out through the pores, delivering constant, all-over relief. In truth, it wasn’t the eczema vaccine as such that Willie had invented, it was the dispersing agent, based on a synthesised fusion of garlic and alcohol. Trying to imagine a suitable active ingredient, Willie had thought it could be one of those fancy perfumes like … erm … Chanel No. 5?

‘Who would want to take Chanel No. 5 in tablet form?’ Ed had challenged.

‘I dunno,’ Willie had said. ‘Women who don’t want to carry the stuff around, I guess. I mean, wouldn’t the

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