Soul

He grinned

, thinking about his own mother and how he loved her and would fight to the death to protect her, but couldn’t stand living with her.

‘The mother of all mothers. Mind if I smoke?’

Without waiting for her reply Gabriel produced a cigarette and a lighter.

‘I guess I’m confused. On the one hand, I can see the advantages, on the other hand, I can foresee a world where every potential parent will have to go through a screening process before being allowed to procreate, or maybe even get relocated to an area where their unborn baby’s skills will be more in demand. I mean, I have a grandfather who committed suicide, a cousin with obsessive compulsive disorder, and my dad’s seriously word blind—where does that put me as a potential gene donor?’

‘I think the word you’re looking for is “father”.’

‘Whatever. I mean, how do you feel? You’ve got to have some family skeletons in the cupboard, right?’

‘Naturally, but because I know the genetic probability of that propensity, I can change my lifestyle to factor that in. Knowing allows me to make an informed choice. Genes interact with environment; it’s not one or the other.’

‘And what about those guys?’ Gabriel pointed to the pinboard. ‘Why would a gene that allows someone to detach emotionally during violent conflict be successful in an evolutionary sense?’

‘The answer to that is obvious. Somewhere in history, evolution favoured an early Homo sapiens who defended his tribe, perhaps even colonised another tribe, ruthlessly. Sometimes I think of genes as a letter that gets handed down the generations, but the letters get scrambled slightly with each delivery, altering the meaning. Okay, back to real work,’ she said, indicating the pinboard. ‘The first thing we have to rule out are the obvious candidate genes that have already been associated with antisocial behaviour, violence etc, like MAOA and any other possible hormonal links.’

‘I’ve labelled and filed the DNA samples we have so far. Do you want me run them over the microray as we go?’

‘That would be great. Mine for MAOA and any other heightened expression that shows up.’

Gabriel threw his cigarette butt out the window. Then, without turning, he asked the question he’d been wanting to ever since he’d walked into the room.

‘So what happened between you and Klaus? I remember meeting him as a kid and he seemed a really nice guy.’

He swung back to her and watched her tidying her desk, her cheeks burning.

‘C’mon, try me. I am wise beyond my years when it comes to matters of women and men. Believe me, if you’d sat in Naomi’s kitchen for as long as I have listening to my mom and every other jilted woman from here to Haight-Ashbury, you’d be wise too.’

She put down her files.

‘Okay, so what’s your advice then?’

‘Become a lesbian. Men aren’t worth it.’

He threw the comment out and waited, his long angular face set in a morose tightness that he knew she would not be able to read.

‘But you’re a man.’

‘Yeah, and if you had as much testosterone pounding through your body as I currently do, you’d be a horny, confused bastard too. He left you, right? No warning, no signs.’

Julia folded her arms resolutely. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Maybe there were clues, but you were just too terrified to go there—you know, fear of abandonment and all that crap.’

‘I said I don’t want to talk about it.’

There was a silence. Outside, a plane climbed its way up out of the afternoon’s smog.

Gabriel, staring at the pinboard, thought about his parents’ divorce. José, his father, had left Naomi when she’d reached the age of thirty-eight, but the indications had been there before. There were so many differences between them. His father was first-generation American and wrestled with the traditional expectations of the Latino women he’d grown up around. Expectations that Naomi—a secular Jew who came from a lineage of domineering women—had found quaint at first, then repressive. Then, when José’s career as a painter took off and Naomi found herself at home alone with a young baby, she began to blame José for her own lack of artistic success. By the time José introduced his new dealer to the family—a dynamic Latino woman ten years his junior—Gabriel, even as a seven year old, had recognised the demise of the marriage.

‘It suits Naomi to think of my father as pathological.’ The earnest tone in his voice surprised even himself. ‘But she’s wrong. If she’d read the signs, she could have saved the marriage. I believe that, I really do.’

‘Sometimes things happen that you can’t explain,’ Julia countered gently. ‘Sometimes people just aren’t honest, good or courageous. Even the ones we think we know really well.’

‘Does that mean you believe in the concept of amorality?’