Tenderness

I've been given a job helping the decorators re-paint the inside of a building called The University of Oxford Plant Sciences Department. The first time I walk into it, I am overcome. It is so beautiful I want to touch every part of it. I want to stay here all night. There are steps in front of it, up to a door, and then it is hard for me to carry on describing it because it feels like a mother to me when I am inside it, and who can describe what that is like?

The steps make me think of a stained glass window I saw in a church, showing The Stairway to Heaven. The people at the bottom, just starting up the stairs, looked a bit hopeful, a bit fearful; the ones spread out along the length of it looked happy, and the nearer they were to the top, the happier they looked. The ones stepping off the top step into God's Kingdom, were bright like angels. The first day in this job, I feel like the people on the bottom step, a bit hopeful, glad to be given a chance; a bit fearful, not sure if I will be found out, if I will be allowed to stay here. Each day it lasts, I'm a bit happier. It would be the Kingdom of Heaven for me, to be one of those people with the right to be working in this place. I can see it up ahead but I don't know how to reach it. It is hard enough, just to hold onto the few steps up I have made.There are people demonstrating at the end of the road with pictures of bleeding cats and beaten up monkeys, and I ask Ben, who works with me preparing for the painters and clearing up after them, why they are there. He tells me they want to stop the University building a laboratory for animal experiments. He says they are 'animal rights activists'. "What are animal rights?" I ask."You know," he says, "the right to life, the right not to be made to suffer.""Where I come from," I say, "people don't have those rights."And straightaway he asks one of the questions I do not want to answer."Where's that?" "Nowhere," I say, and go back to my work.As well as the building, I love the things inside it, though I do not understand their purpose, and I cannot name them. I ask Ben. He tells me I would not understand if he told me. "I can tell you something else, though," he says. "There's a secret room. One we won't be painting. Where the really important stuff goes on.""Where is it?""Wouldn't you like to know?""Yes," I say, "Can you show me?""Maybe."Later, he whispers to follow him. He takes me to the top floor and out on to a metal platform. We open a heavy door, and beyond that is a hallway and another door. To reach it we have to walk across a mat covered in something sticky. The second door lets us into the room. It is like a small greenhouse, only there is no glass, just bright lights. The shelves are covered with pots, with weeds growing in them, all the same weed. Ben says these are Genetically Modified Plants, and the doors and the sticky mat are to prevent the seeds escaping. He says this would be a disaster."What would the disaster be?" I ask. The only disasters I know are earthquakes and floods, drought and war, and these do not happen here. "The balance of nature would be upset," says Ben. I don't know what that means, but I do not think Ben is the person to give me any answers.I meet Susan when I am cleaning the woodwork in a room where she is working. She is friendly and asks my name, so I ask her if she can tell me the machines in the room are used for. They are mostly to keep the bits of plant they work with in good condition, she says. There is a machine for drying them, for freezing them, for making the containers they will be put in so clean no harm can come to them."So much tenderness for a leaf," I say. "We have to be careful," she says. "We need to be sure we are finding the right answers." Susan has her own office, with books, a computer, a photograph of two children. Because I have to sweep up after the men have finished painting, it is easy to stay late. One night I walk past Susan's door, and she is still there. She looks up when she hears my steps and invites me to go in and sit on the spare chair. There is nothing else spare in her room. There is no spare wall between the bookshelves and the posters, and no spare space on the desk between the papers. And apart from the space the spare chair sits in, the floor is covered with more books, and bags. I love this room and I am so happy to be there I cannot stop smiling, and Susan says:"It does me good to see such a cheerful face."I ask her about the Genetically Modified weeds. She tells me they are trying to find ways of changing the plants so they have more advantages for man, like being able to grow with less water for example. I say I cannot see how that could lead to a disaster, as people say it might. She tells me there may be a risk other plants would be harmed, or animals, and I say why does it matter about other plants, and animals, if it means there will be food to eat for children who have no food today."Well, yes, of course that is important," she says. "But there's no point feeding the children today and causing famine for the generation coming after them, by destroying something else they might need to rely on."It seems to me she looks sad. I cannot understand how this is possible but I ask her if she is unhappy. "No, no," she says. "Just tired."After this time, I often visit Susan in her office, when work has finished. Ben talks as if he knows everything, but he knows nothing. Susan talks as if she is not sure of anything, when she knows so much. As I listen to her, it seems to me she is the most honest person I have ever met. She tells me, another day when she looks tired, that she has been working on some figures that seem to prove something many powerful people would like to be true, but she is not certain this is right, so she does not want to let them know until she has worked on these figures some more."Would you earn more money, if you told these powerful people what they want to hear?" I ask her.She laughs. "Well, maybe. The department would earn more money. There would be endless funds for research if the big companies thought we were going to prove something it is in their commercial interests to have proven.""I would take their money," I say."But what if the figures are wrong, and by the time we find this out, it is too late to go back?""No one could take back the money you have earned, the food you have eaten," I say. "George," she says, "I know this is easy for me to say, because I don't have to worry, but you think too much about survival just for today. You should look ahead, think of somewhere you want to get to, something you can look forward to, better than what you have today.""Where I come from," I tell her, "there are men who want to kill you and no food. So I came here. I heard the other people on the truck with me talking about The Home Office, and I thought maybe this was somewhere you could go to be given a Home, and for a while I could picture what that home would look like, and I could imagine the girl who would be cooking and I thought I would be happy. Then I found the purpose of The Home Office was to keep the Homes of everyone who lives here safe from men like me. It should be called The Not-Your-Home Office. So now I think, each day I stay here, that is one more day with food and no one trying to kill me."I do not tell her about the Kingdom of Heaven at the top of the Stairway. If I told her I dreamt of spending all my life in this building, she might be frightened, and think I was going to take something away from her. She might tell The Home Office to send me home."I wish I could help you," she says. I wish I could help her to stop looking so sad. I think it must be because she has so many figures to worry about. One evening I ask if she would like to hear some of the songs I used to sing at home, "They are happy songs.""Oh, if they're happy songs, I would love to hear them."I have to move the spare chair out into the corridor to make enough room for me to move a little and clap my hands, otherwise I could not sing. There is just enough space, but Susan leans back in her chair as if she thinks my songs are pressing her too closely and when I have finished she is crying. "I meant to make you happy," I say. Then she tells me there is nothing I can do to cure her sadness. My songs made her sad because they made her think of her daughter, who loves to sing. Her daughter is eight years old and her name is Madeleine. It is a beautiful name, and in the photograph on the desk she is a beautiful child. But she has a cancer and Susan thinks she may die.I cannot stop thinking about Susan's daughter the next day and I start to feel angry, which is the way with me. If I cannot help the people I love, first I am angry with God, or the Government, or whatever it is that is causing them unhappiness. Then I begin to feel angry with them, for making me feel so sad when there is nothing I can do to help. So I become angry with Susan. I tell myself she has no right to put her sorrow on me, as if I did not have worse to bear than she does. Then I think there is no sorrow worse than to lose a child, and I feel even angrier because, when I have so many burdens of my own, she has brought another I did not have to pile onto my back. She has rolled a boulder down the Stairway, and knocked me so hard I do not have the strength to start climbing back up. I am so weak, and she is so powerful. I think, if she wasn't so careful, so certain she must be right, so worried in case what she does today will harm the world in the future, maybe she could have found the cure in her leaves. Maybe it is her fault Madeleine is going to die. She is just like the demonstrators at the end of the road. She cares too much for the plants, when it is people who matter.I stop visiting her and when she smiles at me in the corridor, I do not smile back. I am at the top of the stairs when I see police in the hall below me, talking to the chief of the painters. I hear my name, and I know that someone has told The Not-Your-Home Office I have no right to be working in this building. I think it must be Susan; she is frightened for her plants. I go into the secret room and hide, waiting for it to be night. When I come out, it is dark and the building is empty. I turn off all the machines we have been told not to touch. I go back to the secret room and take as many pots as I can carry, and I leave both doors open behind me. When I reach the bottom of the steps, before I run away, I tip the pots out onto the grass. The 2007 Subtle Science short story competition was sponsored by The Scientist. To find out more, click here.Click here to read the two runners-up, Bedrock and Equifinality.Anne Youngson mail@the-scientist.comImage: Anne YoungsonLinks within this article:"The subtle side of science," The Scientist, July 13, 2007 http://www.the-scientist.com/news/home/53375

Tenderness

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