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Get Published on Female First
I staggered out of the Angel tube into a pounding sandstorm of snow and dust, some guy halfway down the stairs making a joke about climate change, and I bent my head against the night's fury and headed for City Road Basin as quickly as I could, looking around for state pursuers - or Red Room staff.
I'd changed lines four times and that should have lost them, and in any case full flight wasn't possible: I came close to a slip and fall several times, windmilling in the street like a cartoon skater, even in my Cieros. When I got to Elia Street, hearing no footsteps, nothing but me and the snow barrelling round the curve of the road like a vengeful god in ancient form, there came a flash of panic: the fucking place might not even be open. There were other shelters for me, but in this nuclear winter it would take too long to find them.
But the light at the door and the faint corona of conversation told me that my anxiety had been pre-emptive. Even in early January in semester break and the howling storm, the Soul Kitchen had opened its doors.
It was almost full, the usual year-round session veterans and stayover students drinking Budvar and Cruzcampo, Blue States on the juke; the radiator and body heat almost as much a shock as the outside cold had been. The Professor had got a Southern Comfort and lemonade up before I even reached the bar.
'Rebecca!' He put the drink down. 'I thought you wintered away!'
'Oh, I got sick of Mexican cuisine,' I told him.
'Fair enough. Oh, Suzy asked if I could ask you to text her as soon as I see you. Said she had something interesting for you.'
A woman woke me up after three days. 'You've been told the purpose of this trial?'
'Yeah. We're testing a new drug for hep C, right?'
'That's it.' She was a solid, heavy girl, big childbearing hips, in I guess her late thirties. 'The client thinks that Nocebo-10 may have an advantage compared to antivirals. You're here so that we can measure how well the body tolerates it. How much we can give people without side effects.'
There was a glass of water on the bedside, and a JLB blister pack. 'Tell me about the side effects.'
'Nausea, headaches, rise in blood pressure - oh, and infertility.' Her accent was upwardly mobile working class. 'You know about the infertility risk?'
And they were paying me to take this! 'Yeah, I'm comfortable with the risk.'
'Good.' Another quizzical look, and then she was out of my way.
I threw on my Abercrombie and Fitch hoodie and a pair of jeans and headed down the corridor in search of breakfast. A sign pointed me towards the canteen, which was full of nouveau-twee upper middle class types a little older than me, late twenties or early thirties. You could make out the odd foreign accent, eastern and antipodean, among the estuaries and sloane. I had no interest in getting to know any of them and annexed a table with my full English and George Packer book. The breakfast was damned good for an institution; I felt like I had rediscovered the pleasures of eating.
That day was spent banging out coursework that had been neglected over the last semester. By half four the sky was dark and I began to get that flipside feeling to youth's energetic optimism - terror of sobriety, of the ordered senses, of being clean after the sun goes down. I needed a drink, but of course that was no go. Fighting the reminder that I had four weeks of this, I resolved to find a gym.
The unit had a rec room with banks of Sky-enabled televisions, DVD players, broadband PCs and plasma screens hooked up for video game consoles, but no damned gym. Windows stretched across the curve of the corridors, medical staff walked and talked down the length of the glass. We were in a quarantine unit at the heart of King's, a prison within a hive, and I understood then how limited my movements were. Eventually I ran into some twat with a goatee and combats, chains and bangles all over the show, a traveller for certain.
'What are you looking for?'
'The gym, if there is one.'
'They don't have that facility. Says in the induction pack.' He gave me a sly, idiot smile, the expression of a man who delights in picking up on another's trivial defects and minor failings, and a tremor of hatred went through me. I tend to dislike most people on first meeting: it saves time.
'Fair enough,' I said, and made to get past him, but the fucker blocked me. 'I'm Whitcomb, by the way.' He pronounced it 'Whitcaymb'.
'Rebecca.' I gave his hand a quick one-pump. With the eye of habit I clocked his wallet, the kind that swings on elastic.
'Want to come to the rec room, meet the guys?'
'Not especially.'
'You're in a social space, Rebecca. What's your plan for the next four weeks? Sit in your room, talk to no one?'
'More or less, honey.'
He still wouldn't move, so I pushed him against the wall and went off to find my room.
London drug trials require healthy volunteers between the ages of twenty and sixty. Requirements differ depending on the study, but in general applicants must not be pregnant, addicted to illegal drugs, smoke more than fifteen cigarettes a day, be on any existing medication, suffer from HIV, MRSA, psoriasis, type two diabetes, ulcerative colitis or rheumatoid arthritis. Pay varies according to intensity and duration. The agency were offering a cool six grand for this particular trial because of the infertility risk and also because the study ran from mid December to mid January, meaning that volunteers would spend Christmas and NYE in the unit.
For me the situation was ideal. The duration coincided with Christmas break, and from the chaotic standpoint we had reached by the end of semester, a holiday in a well-equipped sanctum sanatorium was a tempting prospect. The Newham Road crew would never find me here, and the Red Room scandal would die with the worst of the season. Keep your head down, and emerge in the sparkling midwinter, clean and fresh and moneyed up and back on course for a first.
It was the initial medical assessment that made me realise how damaging the last eighteen months had been. My BMI had plummeted to 16.9, just above the 'rush to hospital' zone; my blood pressure was, according to the scan, comparable with that of a soldier on active operations; the past six weeks had been a riot of nosebleeds, chest pains and heart palpitations. I had lived too long and hard: like the girl in the Anne Sexton poem, I'd been a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night, dreaming evil. I needed to save not only my degree and finances but also, possibly, my very life.
Which is why snapping at Whitcomb had been a bad idea, irritating as he was. As the Professor had advised me: don't become a character, don't become a face. At twenty-three I hadn't yet mastered the art of concealing one's contempt for others, and it was another day before I was able to force down my pride like the last swallow of a bad pint and walk into the rec room as if nothing had happened.
By now I needed actual human company - I wasn't as self-sufficient back then, I'm sorry to say. The clean nights ground by with the sound of sirens, the staccato of doctors' voices and footsteps, the cries of the suffering, and I felt relief and delight to see my fellow volunteers hanging tinsel over the plasmas and fixing glitterballs to the tree. The tales of rave and travel, related in tones of braying pedantry, were like a cool palm on my glowing forehead.
I turned all conversation towards my interlocutor (an easy trick since most people prefer to talk about themselves) and learned that they were as I'd expected: trust-fund musicians, perpetual students subsidising PhDs, and professional tourists. They were all from stable and prosperous backgrounds, and while most of them took party drugs, no one seemed to sell or have any real habits: the assessments would have screened out any career junkies or people on the run. There were a couple of migrants from the Philippines trying to fund anthropological fieldwork on mountain tribes. They stood out because they were polite and seemed to take the process seriously. Whitcomb went on about the power of homeopathy the whole time.
So began the clean days. I got into Grand Theft Auto, which I'd loved since I was a kid but never had any real time for. I lost myself in a fluttering company of bourgeois females; we structured our days around television and mainlined The Wire on DVD. During the day I hammered the Dell, firing off essays to my tutors, saving my degree inch by inch. I took a delight in eating, working out in my room, the pleasures of being clean.
And then Whitcomb, the pompous asshole, ruined the whole thing.
On the afternoon of Boxing Day I started getting the odd shaft of pain in the stomach, accompanied by an uneasy shifting sensation in my gut. I put this down to the Christmas dinner, which had been excellent, but by the early evening I could barely stand. Claire and Boyband Paul poured me into the room, and there I lived out around twenty hours of the worst sickness I've known.
I was spared the diarrhoea, but I puked myself dry into the plastic bowl they left, and then I went on heaving even though by then I was shrieking and almost crying with the reflex pain. The childbearer therapist attended at intervals, growing more anxious each time: eventually I was put on a gurney and wheeled into the hospital proper to undergo a series of blood tests and scans. A parade of tired men and women in scrubs and coats, talking among themselves in terse acronyms; someone gave me a shot of what must have been codeine, swamping the pain with wave upon wave of hallucinatory bliss, and I recall being on a gurney in some nameless corridor at around five in the morning, explaining to a doctor younger than I was that the universe is radiant disconnection, and laughing like hell while the doctor just nodded and said that's a beautiful sentiment, and could I keep water down if he gave it to me?
I woke up in my own room the following day. The therapist was there, accompanied by an Asian woman in a suit.
'How are you feeling, Rebecca?'
'Great. Who's your friend?'
'This is Carla Khadia, she's a solicitor acting for JLB Pharmaceuticals, there's just some legal stuff we've got to go through about your recent bad experience. Is that okay?'
I took the clipboard from the lawyer's hand and scanned the document. Khadia talked as I read. 'This is always a risk in clinical trials, and the media don't always report such incidents in a responsible way. The industry and indeed the progress of medical science relies on volunteers, and it would be a real shame if people were put off by what are isolated incidents -'
'Hang on.' I tapped the paper with a fingernail for effect. 'There's no talk of payment here, it's just a confidentiality agreement relinquishing my right to sue, etcetera.'
'That's the gist of it. You're already being paid for this study.'
I handed her the clipboard. 'This is bullshit, I'm not signing this. I want thirty thousand or I walk and talk.'
Khadia's eyes widened. 'Thirty thousand! That's ridiculous!'
'Well, you should have come up with a better drug. Be more careful this time.'
The therapist told me that everyone else was fine. 'As Carla says, this is looking more and more like an isolated incident. And we may decide that one less volunteer won't make a difference to the study. Understood?'
'Sure.' I lay back on my bed. 'Let's wait and see, shall we?'
Of course Khadia was wrong. Within two days another four volunteers had succumbed to violent reaction: Claire, who'd been such a sweetheart through my own ordeal, was up half the night throwing up blood. (Whitcomb, goddamn him, was fine.) Worse for JLB was that everyone else bar the Philippinos had flat-out refused to continue taking the drug.
On the eve of New Year Khadia returned with a revised contract: ten thousand to sign. I argued for fifteen. She said she'd think about it, which I could tell by her face meant capitulation. I had gone into the unit in expectation of getting enough red meat to throw to the pursuing hounds: at this rate I would come out with a clear slate and a few thousand left over.
The good mood was tempered when I strolled into the rec room at eight. It was a fucking jokeshop: big shouty argument going on, with Whitcomb and the breeder therapist at the centre of the whole mess.
' - you've endangered these people's lives!' he was shouting. 'Don't give me your shit about natural reactions and isolated incidents! I've got a right to those blood tests, and -'
'If you don't calm down, there's no point in my being here.' The childbearer spoke with a calm and diplomacy I admired, but it had no effect. Whitcomb continued with his self-righteous bromide; he was a real student politico, this one, and I could sense the others coalescing behind him. That's the trouble with people, they're basically inert: show them a leader, any leader, and they'll fall into line.
The therapist let him rant himself out, which was the right thing to do, and then she spoke again in clear, low tones, making it obvious that she was talking to the group as a whole rather than just Whitcomb. 'I understand that you've all been through a very distressing and painful experience,' she said, 'and -'
'Damn right,' Whitcomb said. The interjection made him look childish, having had all that time to press his case. The therapist just talked over him.
' - but there's no chance of any long term damage. We simply wouldn't take that risk.'
The faces of the company told me that they bought it. I'd let her finish, wait for the others to sleep on it, and then, in knots and ones, talk them into acceptance.
'You guys are the number one priority for the hospital and the company, and while you're here we'll make sure you get the highest standard of care for any reactions you do have.'
A beat of silence in which I could feel the consensus turning. And then the therapist played what she thought was her ace in the hole. 'Of course, since this was a particularly strong reaction, the company would be prepared to consider additional renumeration.'
I could have shot her, because there was no argument less likely to win the volunteers round. Kind of understandable that the therapist had made it, being so clearly from a class where money is vital as air and can't be refused; but she was talking mainly to people to whom cash is not something you think about.
Whitcomb seized on it. 'You think you can just give us money and we'll keep quiet about this?' he demanded. 'You think we'll take the risk of long term health conditions for a few quid in the back pocket?'
The therapist said no, it wasn't like that, but she was shouted down. Whitcomb was in an ecstasy of recognition; the world was conforming to his internal narrative, corporate bad guys screwing over the little man. (That the narrative is so often true didn't make his grandstanding any easier to bear.) Paying someone off is an admission of guilt at best, and those who weren't angry looked worried.
When the therapist had gone Whitcomb got out his IPhone and got on to the Guardian newsdesk. I didn't think he would get a result here, but despite the lateness of the hour and the season the bastard managed to get through to an actual journalist, who promised to be round tomorrow for interviews.
My powers of charm and dissemblance were badly tested then, because being so badly affected myself I had to pretend I was on Whitcomb's side, clapping him on the back for exposing Big Pharma corruption. Eventually the girls went to bed and Whitcomb, still energised, started on a marathon Halo session with a theology postgrad from Leatherhead. I left them to it, and went to bed in a fury: as soon as the story became public domain my fifteen grand was out the window.
Khadia knew it too. She woke me up at eight with a contract. 'We drafted this yesterday, but following recent developments, it may not be necessary to get your signature, wouldn't you agree?' She waved it in front of my face like a chicken piece to one of Suzy's cats. 'As soon as this is published the study's getting wound up and you can walk with nothing.'
I threw a lever arch file at her head, and then regretted that I hadn't been able to come up with a decent exit line.
The journalist seemed like a sensible guy. He arrived late morning in bright anticipation and a thick, snow-stained bubble coat, complaining that it was getting hellish out there, and then interviewed us one by one in the canteen.
I was the last to be called. Claire and the others were in and out in a matter of moments, but Whitcomb must have spent an hour in there. We waited in the rec room, and I passed the time by trying to complete the Vice City Cabmaggedon mission that had been vexing me for days. Finally the reporter came back and called me back to my room, and noting the working of his buttocks and upper thighs as he walked I had the idea we could put the interview time to more creative use. But by now I had a different plan in mind.
He slapped his Dictaphone on the table. 'So, Miss Quayle, can you just confirm that you were one of the four people affected by the drug?'
'Five,' I said, faux-absently.
The guy looked at his notes. 'Five? I've got yourself, Claire, Paul, Jaclyn, and that's - 'Whitcomb too. He was really ill around that time.'
'Him too? He had a reaction to the drug?'
I began to say something, then interrupted myself. 'No. Sorry, I'm being disingenuous. It wasn't the drug, or not just that.'
'How'd you mean?'
'Well, around the time Claire was ill, he had, well, an episode is the only way to describe it.'
'What kind of symptoms? Were the symptoms the same?'
'Not physical symptoms as such. But he was very emotional. It started when he was playing a game on the computer... he got more and more excited and then he just threw the controller against the wall and kicked the TV over.'
'This was the night Claire was ill?'
'Yeah. And then he started pacing the room, around in a circle, over and over again - it was kind of disturbing to look at him. He was talking the whole time. He said that it was because of the Jews that he was feeling this way, that the Jews control the drug companies and they were trying to poison him. He kept running his hands through his hair -' I plunged mine into my own blonde mane, racking it up and down - 'and saying we all need to get our hair tested. Mercury poisoning, he said - he kept going on like that. Fucking Jews, mercury poisoning, fucking Jews, in this weird voice -'
'Did anyone else get, well, these side effects?' The journalist was well off auto pilot now.
'Well, I didn't, and no one else as far as I know. But then, Whitcomb had been smoking a lot of weed that night - you won't tell anyone?' My voice dropped. 'I know you're not allowed to bring it in.'
'Miss Quayle, everything you say to me is totally confidential, and to be honest -' A thought struck him. 'What were you eating over Christmas, I mean, anything unusual?'
'Apart from standard Christmas stuff? Don't know. A lot of prawns. They're big on prawn sandwiches here.'
At that point he turned the tape recorder off.
Over the following days I had the undeniable pleasure of watching Whitcomb slip from his high of New Year's Eve into mounting anxiety and frustration as calls and emails went unacknowledged and unreturned. The others kept asking him when the story would appear, which just pissed him off all the more.
One morning when the therapist was doing my ECG I brought up my own contract. 'It doesn't look like the nationals are going to publish,' I told her, 'so my offer stands.'
'I don't know about that,' the therapist said. 'I mean, if the Guardian doesn't want the story then probably no one else'll want it either.'
'No problem, I'll just go to the Lancet.'
'I'll mention it to Carla. But I can't promise anything.'
'I want an answer today,' I told her.
But I didn't get one. I read, ate, finished off my Thomas Wolfe essay (the uni work was more or less done by this point) and the bitch didn't show. In the rec room the discussion circled and circled and it was starting to get to me: I'd prefer the group just dropped the subject. 'Face it,' I said, 'if the story was going to appear it would have by now.'
Whitcomb gave me an evil. 'You've been against this from the beginning, haven't you? I bet you think we should have taken the pharma money!'
I was a little spooked by his perception, but it didn't show. 'You'd be taking some pharma money anyway. Might as well bargain as hard as you can. I mean, you can put that money into good causes.'
This kickstarted the usual argument and it was so tedious I went back to my room and lay on my bed at a loss.
I kept thinking of the contract, the trial, the media, sure that there was something I'd overlooked, and just as I was sliding over the rim of sleep, it came to me. The bloods.
What can I say: I was a bit scattered around that time. Without blood samples there'd be no evidence of the reaction that I or anyone else had been through. A newspaper or journal could get physical evidence through FoI, but there would be plenty of time for Heather and Carla to get rid of the samples and burn or skewer the results. Probably they would have done it by now. How stupid was I?
There was only one way to find out: I would have to go to the lab and find the samples. The rooms were equipped with call buzzers, on the underside of the bedside table. I pulled on a plain striped shirt and a pair of black leggings and hit the button. Then, as quickly and quietly as I could, I slipped through the corridors and pressed my spine against the corridor on the hinge side of the unit door. Most people kept to the rec room in the evenings; there was a chance for someone to see me crossing the sterile thoroughfare, but no one did.
Soon there was a shuffling from the corridor, a pilot light activated in the swipelock and the door opened. Silently I grabbed the handle, waited until the therapist had disappeared then pulled the door to, slalomed through the gap and closed it with barely a sound.
The lab wasn't hard to find, and no one stopped me: with my functional clothes and head-up stare of concentrated professionalism I could be taken for a house officer. I knew from medical chatter that the lab had been civilianised, a decision that had caused a great deal of inconvenience and very probably some deaths, and didn't expect it to be staffed after five. But although the door was closed, I could hear movements of furtive urgency: toned-down footsteps and the clink of vials.
I tried the handle. Locked. I banged on it. 'Who's there! I need those bloods!'
Instantly an overdone silence, a sound like someone trying not to make a sound. I banged on the door again. 'Fucksake, the trauma ward needs house red immediately! Open this door, say I!'
'Hang on.' A male voice. 'Let me get them for you.' The door opened, and Whitcomb stood there, a tray of vials in his hand. Obviously this was his last-ditch attempt to save his story.
'What the hell are you doing here!'
'I'm getting our blood samples.'
'Fantastic. Let me have them.'
'No way!'
'C'mon.' I pushed past him and closed the door. 'All due respect, which isn't much, you don't exactly shine as a negotiator. Give me the damn vials.'
'You're just going to sell us out!'
I've always held to Irvine Welsh's credo that to lose one's temper is to lose full stop, but this was too fucking much: I was so close to getting a big score, and this twat was standing in the way. I grabbed the tray, he held on, I kicked the bastard in the shins, and Whitcomb doubled over. He'd let go instantly and the momentum sent me reeling backwards into a filing cabinet. The vials shattered over me and around me.
All pragmatism gone, I went for him and knocked him down just as he had got back to his feet. I looked at the filing cabinet, trying to see any unbroken vials in the butcher's slab of blood and broken glass, but before I could find anything there was a shout that could only be security. On the deck Whitcomb was awake but dazed, and I noticed that his wallet had snapped from its elastic during our little fracas. Yoink. I headed out of the door and ran into a couple of guards. In their raised eyebrows I saw how I must look: face running in bloody rivets and torn clothes.
'In there!' I screamed. 'Guy's gone crazy! Found him in there when I was coming to collect and he attacked me!'
They nodded at me and headed inside, and I started running down the corridor before there could be questions and reprisals, thinking the hell with big pharma, it's too much fucking hassle, bouncing off the signs and sprinting across the grounds into the storm of the streets, hoping the snow would wash the blood from my clothes and the broken glass from my lock, and knowing that the clean days were over: time to haunt the black air again, brave now night was here, dreaming evil, getting ready for my shift over the plain houses.
Max Dunbar has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University and currently works as a Reviews Editor at 3:AM online magazine.