He's fiddling with the buttons on his trousers, making sure they're done up.
"What?"
"I've left my purse at home. You haven't got like a tenner lying around, have you? It's no big deal but I've got to put some petrol in the car on the way back. I'll give it back to you tomorrow or something."
He immediately reaches for his wallet and pulls out a twenty.
"Don't worry about it," he says. And then, just as I'm leaving, and in a lower voice: "There's always more where that came from."
As I leave, I wonder if that was better than stealing from the tea and coffee fund in the kitchen, or worse.
Chapter Ten
There's a young woman in my office. She's about my age, or a bit younger, and has thick black glasses and short, blond, curly hair. She's putting books on one of the shelves I cleared. Around her feet are about five other boxes with all kinds of things spilling out of them: mainly books, but also CDs, a small stereo, a plush green frog, and a scrunched-up lab coat.
"Hi," I say, walking around the boxes. "I'm Ariel."
"Oh my God. I'm so sorry about this. I'm Heather." Her accent is Scottish, possibly Edinburgh.
She grins at me, puts down the book she's holding, and holds out a hand for me to shake. I put my own pile of books on my now single desk and take it.
"Seriously," she says. "I'll be out of your hair as soon as possible. It's so nice of you to offer to share, though. I do really appreciate it."
"Er ... That makes me sound like a better person than I am," I say. "Not that I wouldn't have offered. But I was originally sharing this office with my supervisor and he's not around at the moment, so, well, it's logical for me to share, really. My head of department suggested it, though."
"Well, just, thanks so much. I mean, you could have said no."
I couldn't have said no, but still.
"I'm just going to check my e-mail," I say, sitting down at my desk. "But I can give you a hand in a minute if you like."
"No. You're all right. I'll try not to make too much of a mess, though. I don't want to completely ruin your office."
"Honestly," I say. "It's fine."
Heather has already set up her computer on the desk that is now facing the window. The theology guy is therefore going to have the one behind mine, facing the other wall. Heather's computer has got a large, flat-screen monitor, which appears to have gone on standby. I press the buttons to turn on my computer and then I get up and start picking my way through the maze of boxes to go upstairs to check my pigeonhole and get a coffee from the kitchen.
"Do you want a coffee or anything?" I ask Heather as I go.
"Really? Oh, no. I couldn't ask you to make me coffee as well as everything else."
"It's no trouble. I'm already making myself one."
"Oh, OK. But only if it's no trouble. I probably need some to keep me going."
"I know the feeling," I say.
Once I'm back at my desk I immediately start searching the Internet for homoeopathic remedies. From what I can make out they cost about three or four pounds a bottle. I could order them online, but I don't have a credit card so I'll have to go into town. I'm feeling so hungry that I think I might pass out, but I don't think I'll waste any of my money in the canteen. I think I'll finish my coffee and then liberate my car, go home, and have some soup and a bath. Then I can go out and find the Carbo Vegetabilis. There's a huge Boots and two or three health food shops in town, and if these medicines are as ubiquitous as Patrick says I shouldn't have any trouble finding what I need.
While I'm doing this, Heather finishes putting her books on the shelves.
"Oh dear," she says.
I glance up and see her looking at the shelves. "Is everything OK?"
"Oh, sorry, I don't want to disturb you if you're working."
"I'm not," I say. "What is it?"
"I haven't left any room for the other guy."
We both look at the shelves. She really has managed to fill a whole bookcase to the extent that there are even books lying on top of other books and volumes poking out awkwardly as if the other books are trying to eject them. Even the green frog is there, looking squashed. She bites her lip, clearly genuinely worried about this. Then she catches my eye and we both laugh.
"Oh well," I say, shrugging.
"Maybe he won't have many things. I only have mine because everything was in storage. My office was going to be redecorated over the holidays. I suppose if he has, I can always put some of mine back in boxes." She walks over to my desk and looks at my pile of homoeopathy books. She touches one of them as if she thinks it might be contaminated, and then she takes her hand away. "You're an English lit person, aren't you?"
"Um, yeah. Sort of."
"Why the homoeopathy books?"
"Oh, I always have weird books. I'm doing a Ph.D. on thought experiments. I think the department wants to kick me out, actually. It's all a bit too scientific, even if I do look at poetry and stuff as well."
"Thought experiments! How cool."
"Yeah. It is fun. You're an evolutionary biologist, aren't you?"
"Yeah, I've got a postdoctoral fellowship in molecular genetics, so it's kind of evolution from the beginning of time, or at least the beginnings of life, which gets pretty crazy. I get to teach a few of the kids—that's what my old supervisor calls the students—in term time, but mostly I'm making these computer models. Actually, do you want to see something cool?"
"Yeah," I say. "What is it?"
"Look." She touches the mouse on her desk and her flat screen jumps back into life. Suddenly I can see white numbers and letters covering the whole black screen, all changing, like numbers on a stock exchange or information on a computer matrix, as if there should be a tick-tick-tick noise at the same time. "It's working out the origins of life," she says. Then she laughs; it's the kind of high-pitched laugh that ideally needs more people in a room to absorb it. "That sounds a bit mental actually. Sorry."
"Wow," I say, staring at the screen.
"Yeah. Well. My research proposal made it sound a lot more boring than that, but that's essentially what I'm trying to do. It's all about looking for LUCA. Or actually looking beyond LUCA, since no one really believes in LUCA anymore."
I'm still staring at the screen, but Heather now turns away. There's a pencil on her desk and she picks this up and starts playing with it, leaning against her desk with her back to the monitor. The numbers and letters keep changing and repeating in front of me. It's the kind of thing you could watch for ages. You'd watch it all night and then close your eyes and see thousands of letters and numbers still crazily scrolling in the darkness. "What's LUCA?" I ask.
"The Last Universal Common Ancestor."
"Like..."
"The thing we all descended from."
"Aha," I say. "So this program on here. What's it doing?"
Heather runs her hand through her hair. "God—there's a question," she says. Then: "Oh, hello."
A male voice says, "Hi."
I turn around. There's a guy standing in the doorway holding a small box. He's got shoulder-length black hair and he's wearing haphazard layers of black, gray, and off-white clothes. Under his black thigh-length cotton jacket is an open gray shirt. Under that there's a thin black sweatshirt. Under that there seems to be a white T-shirt. Despite all these clothes he is thin and angular-looking with a slightly pointed nose and high, corpselike cheekbones. He also has about three days' stubble. He's young, probably in his early thirties, but his brown-black eyes look millions of years old.
"Hi," I say back. "You must be...?"
"I'm Adam. Apparently there's a space for me to work in here?"
Heather immediately takes charge, pinging around the office like a squash ball.