economy. Give and take. Emphasis on give.’
He sat up and scratched his head. Oh, is that what she was on about? Early-morning light cast a coral shade over her messy dorm room.
‘Girls don’t come every time,’ he said, picking his khaki trousers off the floor beside the bed and sitting up to pull them on.
‘Excuse me?’ She smacked her phone onto the bedside table. ‘What did you say?’
She was kneeling topless in the sheets like a golden nymph in choppy white waves, her face contorting as she started shouting about gender equality and the right to orgasm and again, about poor manners. ‘Frikkin amateur,’ she concluded. ‘Is this your first time or what?’
‘What if it was?’ he scowled as he stood up. ‘Now who has no manners?’
She rolled her eyes. He saw his shirt on the chair and as he strode over to fetch it, he slipped on something. He caught himself by grabbing the edge of a rickety bookshelf and looked down. It was the condom, which he had neglected to knot before tossing on the floor last night. It had spilled its guts and he’d stepped right into them. He lifted his foot with revulsion. This was banana-peel stupid. Naila cracked up. He stepped back to the bed and wiped his foot down the edge of her mattress but she just laughed harder.
His phone buzzed in his trouser pocket and he pulled it out and sat on the bed, avoiding the streak of semen he’d just left there. It was a new message from the anonymous Doctor, an apology for yesterday’s text: sory rong numba, it said.
‘Ugh, I get spam all the time, too,’ Naila commiserated. She was kneeling up behind him on the bed, peering over his shoulder at the screen.
He nodded absently, tapping a reply: who is this?
‘You don’t know your own doctor?’
‘This isn’t my phone,’ he said. ‘It’s my dad’s.’
‘Oh!’ She tumbled onto her back. ‘You mean my hero, Dr Lionel Banda?’
She smiled, sprawled out in her green panties embroidered with – was that…? It was. It was the Zambian flag. She had a chitenge pattern tattooed on her tricep, too. A true patriot.
‘Dr Lionel Banda is dead,’ he said and something small and hard began to buzz in his throat, like a dung beetle was trapped there. He had never had to say those words out loud before.
‘Stop lying.’
He just looked at her.
‘Oh,’ she said softly, her eyebrows knitting. ‘Sorry, men.’
‘I’m trying—’ He stopped and cleared his throat. ‘I’ve been trying to figure out what he was working on before he died. He was doing some pretty important research. On The Virus.’
‘Oh, wow.’ She unconsciously covered her breasts with a forearm. ‘Like, a cure?’
‘Maybe. A vaccine, more likely. I’m still trying to find his lab log.’
‘You don’t have his…files? His experiments or whatever?’
‘All I have is this.’ He held up the phone. ‘I found some articles he sent to himself, but—’ The phone buzzed in his hand and he looked down. ‘This Doctor guy keeps texting—’ He broke off and laughed at the message. He turned the phone so she could read it: WHO IS THIS?!
‘Shame,’ she laughed. ‘Probably thinks he’s getting texts from a graveyard.’
She rolled off the bed onto her feet and stretched her arms overhead. She had small breasts but her ass stretched that Zambian flag taut. She wrapped a chitenge around her torso.
‘Try Memos,’ she said and flounced out of the room to the loo.
Of course. Joseph had only ever looked at the email and messaging apps on the phone. He tapped the microphone icon now and found a dated list of files, the most recent from the day before his father had died. He touched his finger to the screen. Dad’s voice rose into the room, buffeted by wind:
‘…question then is whether to modify the genome of the host or the genome of the vector, which—’
Joseph pressed pause, his whole body sprung with goosebumps.
Naila came back in and started tossing through the mess on her floor, murmuring, ‘Now where are my frikkin keys?’
As she drove the Mazda along the empty roads towards campus, Joseph went through all the apps on the phone, one by one. In Notes, amongst to-do lists and logs riddled with question marks and exclamation points, he finally found what he was looking for. The name mostly showed up as Dr M, but once in a while it was spelled out. Musadabwe. The bedraggled doctor he had met at Dad’s funeral. Joseph sent a text explaining