Excerpt from The Family Tree by Carole Cadwalladr, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

 

Love Story (2) Part 1

What would the award-winning musical score be? The Happy Mondays, perhaps? Or Jimi Hendrix? It was a student party, so it could have been anything really. For we were star-crossed lover-students too. And Alistair was drunk.

The party was being thrown by Alistair's friend John, in a student house with posters of James Dean on the wall and Indian bedspreads across the ceiling. I'd brought a bottle of Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon and was drinking it out of a plastic cup, clenching my teeth and trying not to notice the metallic edge.

Alistair was standing in the corner of the room. I noticed him because he seemed to be staring at me. I saw him take a swig of his wine and then he walked over.

"I could smell you from the other side of the room," he said. I looked at him. I'd vaguely seen him around before but we had never actually met. He was doing some sort of science, I knew that. The party was full of them. Scientists. The type that got up early to cycle off to their labs.

"That's not the greatest of lines, you know."

"It's your pheromones. They're saying that you want to have sex with me."

I changed my mind. It was quite a good line.

"You must have mistranslated. They actually said, ‘Oh God. I can't believe you've brought me to a party full of scientists.'"

He came closer, swaying slightly, and looked down my top.

"You're ovulating."

His face was only inches away and I could see his freckles, the pores of his skin, his eyelashes, the flashes of yellow in the pupils of his eyes.

"Your body is saying you want to have sex with me; it just hasn't communicated that fact to your mind yet."

Actually, it had. Alistair was tall, with rumpled sandy-colored hair. When he smiled, his lips actually turned up at the corners. More importantly, he appeared to fancy me.

"Man is the only mammal who conceals ovulation," he said. He sounded so sure of himself. That was attractive too.

"I thought it was women who ovulated generally."

Alistair wouldn't be put off. He had a point to make.

"Chimps, baboons, apes, they all advertise it. They show that they're ready for sex. Their vulvas swell up or their bottoms go red. In man, ovulation is concealed. Paternity is therefore always in doubt. It's a way of making men stick around just in case the child is theirs."

"And I thought scientists were boring," I said. "When actually they're such good conversationalists."

He'd laughed at that. Although he'd laughed even more when I'd told him I was doing Cultural Studies.

The funny thing was that he was right. I must have been ovulating. Otherwise how would I have got pregnant?



1.4 Theories of Relativity (1)

We're all linked. Connected in some way, although sometimes it's hard to know exactly how. Take me and Tiffany.

Tiffany is my sister. My older sister. I've always considered that significant, although Alistair says it makes no difference. He says that the idea that birth order influences personality is pseudo-scientific hogwash, so perhaps it makes no difference. Apart from the fact that she always gets her own way and always has.

I've been married to Alistair for nearly a decade, so I've absorbed certain information over the years. He's a behavioral geneticist. Deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, that's his thing, but also alleles, exons, introns, ribosomes, eukaryotes, transgenic mice, dyzgotic twins, nematopoietic stem cells and recombinant clones. It's his secret language. LUCA—the Last Universal Common Ancestor—Jansky's nomenclature, homologous chromosomes, the Kruppel gene, the huckebein gene, the Wolf-Hirschhorn gene. Find a gene and you can name it. Unravel a fragment of life and it's yours forever.

From The Family Tree by Carole Cadwalladr, pages 1-17. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.