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THIRTY-ONE

Saturday, 7.05pm, Cape Town, South Africa

He used to come here when it was all-white. This beach, with its gentle curve of fair sand, was one of his favourite spots. When he was a student, he would come to ogle the girls and drink beers by the crateload. Back in those days, outsiders thought his country was in flames, consumed by a race war. But it did not feel like that; at least not to him. He was white and well-off and having the time of his life. He knew a couple of guys who had signed a petition, but otherwise politics did not intrude. Besides, as an Afrikaaner who had grown up in the rural heartland of the Transvaal, he was raised to believe the separation of the races, apartheid, was not offensive but natural. On the farm, rabbits and cows had their own places and did not mix, so why should blacks and whites be any different?

Now the beach looked as beautiful as ever, the water glittering in the moonlight. As he faced the Atlantic Ocean, he could hear the buzz of the bars behind him: a more mixed crowd now, black, white and what he had grown up calling coloured. He tried to tune out the noise; he wanted to listen to his own thoughts.

Was he elated by what he had just done? He was not sure. Relieved, certainly. He had been planning this moment for months. Each day, taking a different document home – sometimes a diagram, sometimes a string of algebraic numbers – until he had built up the full set.

He breathed out heavily. He remembered those years at university, followed by more years in graduate school, most of them spent in a lab. He had become a research pharmacologist by the time he was twenty-seven and had spent the next fifteen years working on a single project, codenamed Operation Help. It was his boss’s little joke, playing on ‘help’ as a synonym. For Andre van Zyl belonged to a team searching for a cure for AIDS.

They were just a part of it, of course. The headquarters of the research effort was in New York, with satellite teams in Paris and Geneva. The South Africa field office was smaller still, chosen for what the corporate literature called its ‘clinical resonance’. Translation: South Africa had a handy supply of AIDS sufferers.

They had been testing out new remedies on groups for years now. Andre had been at some of the trials, clinics out in the sticks taking one hundred sick men and women, marking fifty of them as a control group and handing new tablets to the rest. Andre had been at his computer when the results came through. Time after time his reports had had the same conclusion: no impact; statistically negligible results; needs further work.

But nine months ago, a set of data had come back that could not be ignored. The sample group had shown an improvement unlike any seen before. The symptoms were not just held at bay; they were becoming non-existent. The medication seemed not only to pacify the virus, but to chase it out of the system altogether.

Within a week, scientists from the Geneva team had flown in to see the patients for themselves. A few days later the head of the entire project arrived from New York. He ordered the control group be put onto the new drugs immediately, on ‘humanitarian grounds’.

Andre had to laugh at that. For he knew what would happen next. The head honcho from America would publish a paper in Nature, hailing his breakthrough and bidding for the Nobel prize that was surely his, while the US Food and Drug Administration would start testing the new tablet. Once they had given the seal of approval, it would go on sale and make the company they all worked for one of the richest in the world. They had found the Holy Grail of twenty-first century medicine: they had found a cure for AIDS.

The only trouble were people like Grace, the woman Andre had met on one of the earliest trials. Too poor to get the antiretroviral medicine she needed, AIDS was a death sentence for her – not a condition that could be lived with, as it was in Europe or the US. This cure would be no cure for her or for the millions of women, men and children like her, all over the world. The new drug would never reach them because it would be too expensive. The company had a patent on the new medicine that would last twenty years: until then, they had a monopoly and could charge what they liked.

So he had gone to the FedEx office earlier that day with a large box addressed to a man he had never met in Mumbai, India. Revered and reviled as the king of the copycats, this man had made a fortune making bootleg copies of the latest western drugs and selling them to the Third World for a tenth of the price. He had done it with some of the early AIDS medicines. Now, in the next day or two, he would receive a full blueprint for the cure. Andre’s note issued a clear demand: ‘Make this drug and distribute it to the world. Now.’

The sun was beginning to set; he could hear the waves more easily than he could see them. He would go to a bar and chug back a beer. Who knew when he would get another chance. Tomorrow the company might discover his theft, his treachery, and have him arrested on a dozen counts. With this much money at stake, they would have to make an example of him: he could be in jail for years.

So he decided to savour this night. He drank, he flirted. And when one beautiful girl, with long bronzed legs and a skirt that barely stretched over her bottom, came on to him, he rose to the occasion. She laughed at his jokes; he rested his hand on her smooth, naked thigh.

The ride in her open-topped car was punctuated by long, open-mouthed kisses at each traffic light. They fell into her apartment, her clothes falling willingly to the floor. And when she went to fix him a drink, he gulped it down gratefully, not even noticing the powdery residue still undissolved at the bottom of the glass.

He coughed a little; he grew dizzy and resolved to drink less next time. As he lost consciousness and fell towards death, he could hear the girl’s voice, gently reciting what sounded like a poem. Or perhaps a prayer.