Lust Or No Harm Done

everything. It is wasteful. It tries too hard.'

His eyes said: I am going to live. I am going to live without conditions.

Two weeks later Picasso stood at night on the doorstep. He had a new leather jacket slung over one shoulder and a shaved bristly head and a stud earring. He had started to sell pictures; his agent had found him a flat. He was in an expansive mood.

'I am going to live!' he said, rocking on his heels.

'Indeed,' said Michael, smiling with him.

Picasso took his hand. 'And the work. It will live too?'

'For as long as you do. When you go… the paintings, the sculptures will disappear.'

'Like the flowers,' said Picasso, and his face was impossible to read. It was regretful but happy.

'Except for your computer pieces. Uh… I have not told you this. Mr Miazga. I made a deal with him.'

For some reason, Picasso threw his head back and laughed aloud.

'He is keying in all your work again. So it will remain. It will stay.'

Picasso was still laughing. 'Poor Miazga. Regard! There is a man who gives everything!'

'The deal is that you stop screwing his wife.' It was terrible, but Michael was grinning too, without knowing why, and he suddenly spurted out a laugh.

'He can have her!' declared Picasso, with a wave of his hand, dismissing her, it, everything. He did his little dance in place. His eyes looked at Michael, brimming with affection.

'You,' Picasso said with one finger, 'Are.' Two fingers together made a sign like a blessing. He gave Michael a hug and whispered in his ear, 'But I really hated screwing you.' The words broke apart like rocks with laughter.

'Liar,' said Michael. 'You were in me all night.'

Picasso stepped back. 'True,' he proclaimed. He spun around and held up a hand to wave goodbye. 'True!' he bellowed as he walked away without looking back.

And Michael for some reason felt a wild unaccountable joy. It was as if there were a giant tiger lily flower all red, spangled with yellow, and it was just beyond the sky, filling it, invisible. I am going to live, Michael repeated. He watched Picasso's retreating back with love and gratitude and relief.

What am I looking for?

Michael finally cleared his in tray and saw in it a reminder: Deadline for grant proposals. He lightly thought: why have they sent me this? The answer seemed to thump him in the heart.

Because you didn't do the application.

No, I must have. Didn't I? Michael couldn't remember not doing it, but then you don't remember not doing something. He was sure he had done it. Well, or rather, it felt as if he had.

But his only memory of application forms was, he realized, from last year, for the six-month initial grant. He opened up My Documents, he did a Find, and there was no file called application or council form or any other likely name on either the server or his hard disk. He must have sent it out, he couldn't have been so stupid. He sorted all his e-mails by address and looked at everything he had sent to the Council. Only one had an attachment, and that was simply the first progress report.

Michael went out and asked Ebru if she still kept a record of all outgoing and incoming white mail.

'Mmmm hmmm,' she said, and handed him the register.

'Good girl,' he said wistfully, looking at her brisk, pinched face. And she was a good girl, better than he was, to record each outgoing item of post. It wasn't as if she were a secretary; she was a postgraduate researcher.

Michael went though the list line by line for all of August and September: there was nothing, no conventional mail whatsoever to the Biological Research Funding Council.

'Do we have a record of courier dispatches?'

Her eyes said of course we have. 'Yes; that what you were looking for, Michael?'

Ebru's gaze was upsettingly direct and unfriendly. She was plainly fed up with him. There was nothing in her manner to encourage him to tell her what had happened.

Michael lied. 'I sent back some faulty software, I need to know when.'

'If you'll tell me where you sent it, I could find it for you.'

'Well, I know roughly when and I know it was sent by ordinary post, so it'll be easier if I just scan for it.'

Her grey eyes rested on his, and then she shrugged, and then she passed the dispatch courier receipts in silence.

There were only three dispatches in August and none of them was for the Research Council.

Michael slowly closed the register and found that his limbs did not want to move.

There would have been no funding after September. They should have enough to finish the light learning experiment, but that wasn't the point. The point was to use the current study as a benchmark to see how other learning activities produced different results. They'd talked about it, the team expected it. Michael could not believe he had done it, that he had fucked up that badly, that he was so stupid, so incompetent. His flesh seemed to crawl nervously all over his bones. Part of him was trying to take action, or perhaps, escape himself.

He rang the Research Council. The conversation left his heart shrivelled with shame. The neurology contact was a man called Geoffrey Malterton; he was, as ever, pleased to hear from Michael. Geoffrey sounded ebullient and efficient – nothing out of place in his life, then. 'Whoa, you're weeks too late, months too late. It's all been snatched up, I'm afraid. I'm sorry, but you know how fierce the competition is for grants. What, is your project still unfinished?'

'No, no, not at all, it's just that we've had some new ideas.' Michael tried to sound bright and alert.

'Well, then you can always apply next year. The answer is no for this year's money, I'm afraid.'

Michael asked Emilio for the project accounts. He avoided asking Ebru. As soon as he saw the spreadsheet, their situation was so obvious that he wondered why the staff weren't talking about it. Simply there had been no income except interest since April 1. It was now late October.

Did they have enough to continue? Michael had supposed he would be able during the year to raise more money from other sources. They had roughly one month of money left. He recalculated their budget, remembering extras like stationery and an unpaid water bill, and had a moment's panic. Then he remembered: interest was compounded quarterly and that would be paid in at the end of November. He had to track their steadily decreasing principal and try to calculate the interest. It was all back-of-an-envelope stuff, but the interest made the difference. They would be OK. OK meant that there was enough money to give all the staff their contractually required one month's notice.

It could all be made to seem deliberate. They had enough basic data for this particular project. Michael could just ignore the idea they had of following it up. They should make sure that all the data were entered and correct and then run the reports. There would even be time and money if they needed one final trial, one more order of chicks, to fill any gaps in data or design.

There was always a problem with staff near the end of • research projects. You tell them the project will end just when their work must be at its most meticulous. Yes, they had known all along it would come to an end, but yes, they have living expenses, so they have to look for the next contract or post. They often leave before finishing, especially when the end of the project is unexpected and they have not been able to plan.

He went to the cold store. They had done a good job while he was going crazy. The slides were all in order and labelled. The salami wafers had all been stained and stored. With something numb and slow, part way between dread and relief, he saw: the project had been well done.

Michael went into the soft, dark, red-lit room. There were the chicks, his chicks, peeping out of need and hunger. They were warm and feathery in his hands, as light as dust, kicking and struggling for life. They would be the last batch to be killed.

And suddenly Michael saw them afresh; they were like his Angels, all his beautiful Angels alive and hungry and here for such a short time. He was surprised by a sudden welling up of tears. He loved them. He was going to lose them. He loved them and he didn't want to kill them. He stood transfixed by confusion, torn by irreconcilable emotions, for the chicks, for his research, for his old life with its mild addictions to science, order, and shots of whisky and of semen. He had no desire or idea of what to desire. Simply, he was unmanned, meaning he had lost