MELONELLA. BLUE VODKA. STEEL CERISE
[EXTRACT]
The Friendly Hotel is off Junction 32 and the Carvery Special Offer all Sunday lunch stuff, nothing for Tuesday 9pm. She chooses pork with an Indonesian sauce from the menu, because she would never make Indonesian at home.
And white wine. The pork and rice isn't enough for the bottle, on top of the Pils she'd had in her room to kill the driving.
Sorbet isn't on the menu but Katherine asks if they can find some, and they bring her ice-cream. The waitress starts laying the next table.
"Excuse me, this is ice-cream, not sorbet."
The waitress looks in the bowl ready to argue, concedes "I'll see if there's any." and takes the ice-cream back to the kitchens.
The other two in the long red dining room are men, each sitting alone, slouched over coffee, suit jackets on the backs of their chairs. They stare at the waitress, or the mass-produced hunting prints, or Katherine, with dark still-hungry Welsh eyes.
She goes back to her book. CHAPTER TWO
By the third page, she recognizes what she read over the Indonesian pork, when she'd been thinking, I chose it because I never cook it at home, but I don't ever cook at home now, watching the waitress do her Spanish homework at the till, remembered reading in Spanish bars lined with little bread boats of tomato, cheese and meats.
Eventually the sorbet comes. The scoops of passionfruit and blackcurrant are insubstantial crushed ice, the lemon creamy and solid. She signs the meal to her tab, takes the novel and her coffee to the bar, gets a double brandy. Sitting on a sofa she picks up a copy of Marie Claire left on the low lounge table. The headache starts during the third line of Aries.
The two men from the dining room come in and order pints, perching on stools at opposite ends of the bar. As she orders another double, they watch her cross the room and tilt their heads away from the bar to see how her back falls. Taking the drink back to 206 she passes the function room, a loud dinner for a conference of biochemists.
Two have spilled out and under one of the perspex telephone canopies. A student in his first suit is being leaned on by a tall shaggy crow, in her forties, blue glasses and russet feather earrings. They don't see Katherine steal an unclaimed conference pack off the reception table. The woman has her left arm across the boy's ribs, her hand tucked up his inside his jacket, her thumb on his nipple.
Katherine's room is still with heat, she takes off her jacket, shoes and stockings, puts the drink beside the bed, gets onto the bed, snaps the head off a plastic bottle of water from the minibar, pours some into the brandy, pushes the pillows up behind her and opens the book.
CHAPTER THREE
The headache begins to split
across her eyebrows and Katherine hasn't got any pills. She lies flat on the
bed, the mercury tilts in her head and she rolls onto her side and pulls a paper
out from the biochemists' conference pack to fix her eyes.
"Bimolecular Interaction Analysis (BIA) has been revolutionized over the
last five years by the development of the BIA Core by Phramacia Biosensors.
Using optical immunosensor technology based on the phenomenon of surface plasmon
resonance (SPR). The BIACORE TM has enabled real time monitoring of the kinetic
rate constants (ka and kd) of bimolecular interactions. One component is immobilised
on the surface of a gold chip and the interaction with its ligand is monitored
by changes in refractive index at the surface."
Katherine wonders whether the language of selling new paint colours to DIY stores could sound such a brick wall to a biochemist.
Recites, "Mellonella, Blue Vodka, Steel Cerise." Burps.
Pushing her head straight out on the end of her neck, to stop it bouncing, she gets her legs over the side of the bed, sits, eases herself up, shuffles across to take the dryness out of the heat. She forces the window open the two inches it will go, slips out of her skirt and unbuttons her shirt, sticks her nose and mouth out into the freezing air.
Her eyes get used to the dark. The room looks out onto the blue metal wall of an out of town carpet store. Katherine gnaws her knuckle. Sips.
Recites, "Forty-six weeks on the run, seventy thousand miles, eight hundred and nineteen visits. Brandy burn in the sternum."
And the burn comes. Suddenly cold she gets under the cover on top of the sheets. Picks up the conference pack....
"The range of applications is phenomenal starting from characterization of antibody:antigen interactions through drug:recepter, DNA:DNA, DAN:protein (e.g transcription factors) multicomponent complex assembly (e.g. Class 1 MHC assembly) and whole cell interactions using both bacterial and mammalian cells."
.... puts her head in the pillow and the ache thumps to get out.