Soul

Julia looked up at the unfamiliar voice. A lithe adolescent was lounging against the kitchen door frame. His shoulder-length black hair was swept back in a ponytail incongruously fastened with a girl’s plastic bauble, and ridiculously skinny wrists poked out from a very loose long-sleeved T-shirt printed with Che Guevara’s face and the words ‘Freedom does not lie in martyrdom’ in Spanish. The crotch of his baggy jeans appeared to hang less than a foot from the ground and on his feet he wore state-of-the-art Adidas sneakers—constructions of gold latex and red suede that resembled miniature racing cars.

‘Please excuse my son,’ Naomi put her hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. ‘His emotional development is AWOL thanks to his father’s influence. I knew it was a mistake to let him go live with José.’

‘Mom! I’ve told you before, don’t talk about me in the third person. I am here.’ He shrugged her hand off.

‘Gabriel?’ Julia stared at the youth, who was over six foot and quite possibly shaved. The last time she saw him, he’d been an ethereal-looking fourteen year old who hid behind large glasses and mouth braces.

‘Yeah, I know. Hormones happen. Like the fucking weather—predictable, but difficult to pinpoint exactly when,’ he replied nonchalantly, then looked at Naomi. ‘Have you asked her yet?’ His voice dipped suddenly into a child-like appeal, opening a chink in his aggressive persona.

‘Baby, can’t you see we’re having a female-to-female moment?’

‘No, all I see is your usual polarisation of a situation that is causing Julia some distress.’ He turned to Julia. ‘Forgive Naomi, she thinks the world is one giant Playstation: abandoned women against callous men.’

‘I see you’ve moved on from Dr Seuss.’

‘Yeah, and my balls have dropped too.’

‘I brought Gabriel here with an ulterior motive,’ Naomi said to Julia. ‘He’s in his first year at Cal-Tech.’

‘That’s right, you got the Xandox company fellowship. Congratulations.’

‘Yeah, I’m one of the multi-corporation’s greatest assets, they just don’t know it yet,’ he retorted cynically. Again, he dropped his eyes and shuffled his feet, but this time Julia could see that he was quite shy beneath the bravado.

‘The course is okay,’ he went on, ‘but limited in the area of functional genetics, which is what I really want to major in.’

‘And he’s looking for a summer placement in a lab,’ Naomi finished.

Julia looked down at her hands; her wedding ring, now loose from weight loss, seemed to wink up at her like a bad joke. A small cut on her index finger had started bleeding and she hadn’t even noticed. The last thing she needed right now was to look after some precocious college student.

‘Naomi, I’m right in the middle of a horrible separation, the lawyers are on my back, and the most ambitious piece of research I’ve ever taken on has to be completed in the next six months…’

Namoi lost her temper. ‘Fine! Whatever! You’ve always placed your career before your friends, so why on earth I thought you might change now I really don’t know!’

She grabbed Gabriel and began hauling him towards the front door. Pulling himself free, Gabriel stood squarely in front of Julia.

‘I topped biology, math, physics and science this year. I speak and write fluent Spanish. I want to get into bio-tech. That’s the future—brain chemistry, stem cells, the genome. I’ve read all your papers, including the infamous one you presented at The Violence Initiative.’

‘And what did you think?’

‘Simplistic in the socio-economics area, but solid for its era.’

Naomi pulled at his T-shirt. ‘Gabriel, you’re wasting your time.’

‘I’ve read Rosalind Franklin’s work, I’ve also ploughed through Barbara McClintock, Linus Pauling, and Watson’s The Double Helix—like twice. I dare you to mentor me, it’ll make you famous.’ He delivered the speech as a rap, mimicking a rapper’s shuffle and hand gestures.

‘I don’t know, the commission is huge,’ Julia said. ‘I have a couple of people working for me in Washington State and the mid-west but in total I have to interview and test five hundred twins.’

‘Let me guess—that old chestnut, violence and genetics?’

‘It’s not an “old chestnut”; it’s a very important and potentially contentious part of the future of genetics.’

‘Cool, I’m into contentious.’

Julia glanced down at Gabriel’s large hands; they seemed adult before the rest of him, his skinny wrists a vulnerable contrast.

‘You know the hours are long and the pay is lousy?’

‘I don’t care. I’ll work for free if I have to. I’m ambitious. Cal-Tech is kindergarten in comparison.’