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friends
and neighbours looked at them with pity as they passed in the street. Someone even
edited Wikipedia to reflect that this previously distinguished scientist had been
a lecherous old man all along.
    His wife placed her hand over his on the steering wheel.
    ‘Don’t go,’ she said.
    It seemed important to her, this theory about the casino.
    ‘I’m due for a win,’ he said. ‘I’m so close tonight. I can feel it.’
    Now, in the basement of his former workplace, the last of Mendel’s conspirators takes
his seat. They’re an unskilled group of varied education, but they’ve shown an unyielding
passion for his cause. These late-night discussions—the six of them huddled over
plans in the dark, sourcing materials and exchanging funds, plotting their way to
a different and better world—have become a comfort to them. So much so, Mendel fears,
that for some the group itself is now more important than the plan they are putting
into action. That’s why he came up with the rules about sharing personal stories.
He needs their certainty to keep his doubts at bay.
    ‘Let’s begin.’
    His confidence returns.
    ‘I’ve got big news for you all,’ he says. ‘We’ve got some decisions to make.’
    After the meeting, Sean returns home the usual way, on foot and alone, nervous about
the possibility of discovery but also thrilled to be outdoors.
    This week, there’s something else. A feeling that isn’t frustration or anticipation,
although it is like them. A yearning maybe, although for what he can’t articulate.
Whether it has something to do with Mendel’s news, or whether it’s more of a physical
thing, a bodily response to the feeling of running in the night, back to the locked-up
house where he’ll be shut away for the next week, Sean can’t say.
    At home the yard is dark and Sean wonders if suburbs like his might be the quietest
places in the world. He climbs back up and in through his window, strips down to
his shorts and slides into bed. He lies still under his sheet. The unsettled feeling
stays with him, but sleep comes anyway.
    When François visits on Saturday afternoon, he finds Sean in an uncharacteristically
bad mood. François has been in the park, playing cricket all morning with some younger
boys from the neighbourhood and a couple of girls from their school. François’s dark
skin is flushed from the sun, or from the effort of the game, or from excitement.
He presumes these factors, his perspiring face and breathy tales about runs scored
and catches made, are the cause for Sean’s mood.
    ‘I ran here,’ he says, in his defence. ‘That’s why I’m puffed. I lost track of time.
I wanted to tell you about the game.’
    ‘It’s okay,’ Sean says. His mood has nothing to do with François. He isn’t jealous.
If anything, the simplicity of his friend’s happiness is reassuring. It’s only that
it makes Sean guilty.
    ‘I need to talk to you,’ Sean says, by way of introduction. ‘It’s about the punishment.’
He sits on the corner of his bed and prepares himself for the conversation.
    François comes closer. He sweeps down with an awkward hug and Sean is caught by surprise.
He stands and slips his arms around his friend’s back and they stay like that for
a few seconds.
    ‘The whole time we were playing, I was thinking how much better it would be if you
were there,’ François says.
    Once he is alone, Sean slides his biochemistry textbook from his pile of books and
unfolds the sheet of paper he keeps inside. He marks a tick in column ‘V’, for Visit,
as he always does. Sean still hasn’t told François the truth about what is going
to happen. He wants to mark down François’ hug. On any other day he would consider
naming an entirely new column for it, ‘Hug’ perhaps, or ‘Embrace.’ But today he can’t
do it. Sean folds the paper and closes it into the pages of the book it came from.
This is the last time he’ll look at it.
    Over recent weeks, Gregor Mendel’s work