Radium: A Love Story by Dr Bridget L Stocker

This article features the winners of the 2011 Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Prize for Creative Science Writing. The theme of this year’s competition, held in association with the Listener and Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters, was “Chemistry and Our World”. Judge Jo Randerson says she found plenty of chemistry in the entries. The real contenders in the fiction works showed evidence of a stable structure and the winning essay argued that the terms “natural” and “chemical” have become unnecessarily polarised.

M. Curie – The Radium Institute,
Rue d’Ulm, Paris, 1934

I wait impatiently in my office, the nib of my pen poised above the page. Writing your story, from your birth and christening to your slow demise, is just a means to fill the time.

I am to explain the principles of ‘the Curie’, the rate of your decay, and yet my mind wanders. To write about the end is a travesty. I must focus on how it began. First, I need to be alone.

Messieurs Guillot, Goldschmidt and Desgranges left the institute just after eight, and for this, I am pleased. I watched from my window as they wheeled their bicycles across the courtyard and along the cobblestone path that cuts through the trees. Of course, I cannot be sure that it was them – what with my eyes, and the fuzzy peach light that washes over Paris in the evening – I cannot be sure of much that goes on outside; though I pretend to know. I do not admit to the failings of my body.

Like the spectral lines that I have the students so thoroughly explain, the marks of the atoms upon the photographic plate described with so much detail that I capture them in my mind before I view the plate itself, I see everything with clarity. The soft stone hues of the Parisian apartments, the wrought-iron balconies, the distant Eiffel Tower, arching into a sky smudged grey with the beginnings of the night – I see these things with as much certainty as if it were thirty-five years ago and I was standing in the old laboratory on Rue Lhomond with my Pierre looking out over the city.

I put down my pen and shuffle the manuscript on my desk. My movements are clumsy and awkward and the papers slip from my fingers and fan themselves across the polished oak tabletop. ‘Radioactivity. M. Curie.’ I place the cover sheet on top where it should be and make a tidy stack. I am too tired to continue and my eyes too sore – and you know why. Slipping away from my desk, I leave my office and walk down the corridor.

My charcoal dress, which is a practical colour for experimental work, brushes along the walls. I am almost certain that Mademoiselle Emmanuel-Zavizziano is still in the laboratory. She is exceptionally hard-working, even outstaying my own Irène on many occasions, and is certainly destined to achieve provided she continues to toil and struggle so. Of course, I wish her every success, but tonight I am anxious for her to leave. I pause outside the laboratory and listen to the gentle clinking of test tubes and the purr of the bunsen burner in the distant corner of the room, but do not open the door. To break the spell, that beautiful moment between a scientist and her experiments, is worse than speaking out against the Lord, if I were to believe in such a thing as God. And so I return to my desk.

A little after nine, I hear the shutters being pulled. Those giant eyelids fall across the interior of the laboratory and the sound of the diminutive Mademoiselle Emmanuel-Zavizziano can be heard as she scurries like a field mouse in her brown-grey pinafore along the corridors and then from the Radium Institute into the warm spring night.

Feeling suddenly fatigued, I wait for a moment before standing. It must be the fever. It takes me at moments unknown and leaves me light-headed. Blood disorders, tuberculosis? – the doctor tells me much, though the actual cause of my illness is not spoken. I will not hear of it. I will not have him, or any other, speak badly of you – the one who took so much from me, including the tips of my fingers, now brittle and calloused, grayish, and often sore. And yet you gave so much. It is only in letters to my sister Bronia that I whisper your name.

The corridors are dark. I walk them alone. There are no students sitting in the stairwell next to the radiator, the informal gathering place where we often stop and talk. Inside the laboratory, there is no clinking of glass, no bubble of solution or grind of pestle against stone. The benches are clean, dotted only by small crucibles of salts, and none containing samples as brilliant as those that I first viewed with Pierre. The light from the faeries, Pierre and I would think, though we were both educated to the point where we would not utter such silly words.

We would stand in the dark laboratory on Rue Lhomond amongst the luminous silhouettes of our flasks – objects that seemed suspended in the air. Faerie dust nestled in our crucibles, twinkling along the walls of our test tubes and vials, a green glow, unearthly in its radiance, and yet how warm it was. I would link my arm through Pierre’s and say nothing; we would stand together, unmoving and silent. We did not understand then, and we are only beginning to understand now. You with your beautiful green light, the energy that falls from you; and yet, unbeknown to us, was the sharpness of your touch. How you scarred my fingers so, and how you scarred my Pierre. He placed you against his skin for less than a day and you burnt him, turned the patch on his arm to a blister, then forever more, to a faint shade of grey. But how exciting that was!

Rutherford, they say, was the first to really understand you, though at the time, his notions about the atomist theory had not earned the right to be taken seriously. Even the great Mendeleev insisted on the immutability of the atoms forming the elements and to suggest that elements were not elemental was, to him, akin to alchemy. I too was skeptical of Rutherford’s theory, though in time grew to accept it. I found that your energy, or radioactivity as we termed it, which fell from your body, was a property central to you and your atomic makeup and was independent of your chemical form. However, to believe, as Rutherford did, that the energy that you emitted came un-replenished from your body, vexed me no end.

There was no detectable change in your mass though I had cradled and weighed you with the utmost care. And so I believed that you absorbed energy from the world, which you then slowly released. To think that you would not stay with me, that you would slowly disappear – what, after all that toil! – that was something I could not comprehend. I pulled you from the earth.

You will not remember it, but it took three years for your birth, from twenty kilograms of pitchblende, boiled in a cauldron, stirred with an iron rod taller than myself, and which at times felt twice as heavy. And from the cauldron to the bench, where I would mix you with my salts, extract you from the ore, until I had the tiniest crystals. And from those crystals we detected your energy using Pierre’s piezoelectric device. It was only many years later that I conceded to Rutherford’s notion and admitted that your energy came from your core. By then your place on the periodic table was secure. You would not be taken from me. I had nothing to fear.

But if Rutherford was the first to pull you apart, to account for your mystery and those rays, alpha rays he called them, positively charged Helium nuclei fleeing from your body and leaving you a little lighter and with a little less vigour, it was I who nurtured you and who saw in you your good. If only my dear father were here to witness it. My beloved father, always the pragmatist, who after commenting on the extent of my toils concluded that I produced what? – one decigram of radium of unknown worth; a quantity less than the ashes of a match.

My father, if only he could see the hope that you bring and how you cure cancer with your wonderful rays. You outshine the X-rays of your bigger sister, which are only diagnostic and used for imaging bones. Of course, in criminal hands, you could do much harm, and Pierre and I often pondered whether humanity was at an advantage in knowing your secrets. The discoveries of Nobel are a case in point; powerful explosives have allowed men to do admirable work. They are also a terrible means of destruction in the hands of great criminals who lead people into war. But like Pierre, who so eloquently noted this upon the acceptance of our award, I am among those who think with Nobel that humanity will derive more good than bad from new discoveries. And as your creator, I will nurture your cause.

I move towards you in the dark, though with eyes so dim and the absence of shimmering dust lightening the way, I am slow. Now that we have separated you from your chloride salts, we keep you hidden. We keep you pure and stored in vials of nitrogen to stop the oxygen in the air tarnishing your silver-white skin. And once inside those vials, we lock you behind walls of lead and place you in a cabinet on the wall. This is to control you.

I withdraw the key that hangs on a piece of string, resting just above my breast, and unlock the cabinet door. The lead case is thick and dull and heavy and it takes all my energy to place the box on the bench. I open the lid, unwind the cloth; my hands are trembling, my fingertips rough and my nails chipped. It is dark outside, but in here, the air begins to glow a wondrous green. It has been over thirty-five years and I am still under your spell.

My Pierre is gone. Even my Paul – oh, what a scandal that the two of us were not allowed to be in each other’s arms. But you, you are here – you with your soft green light. They can take everything from me and deny me of more, but I care not for it. My refusal into The Academy of Sciences because I published with Pierre – I was just his assistant, so they say. And then, following my beloved’s death, they say that I published with other men, when for men, this is no impediment. And what about those who claimed that I’d won too many awards and had honours enough! But you know the truth. You know that it was I who laboured and brought you into the world in the way only a woman could. The rest is of no concern.

I unwrap the last of the cloth swathing and cup you in my palms – my child inside a smooth glass bottle, a womb glowing soft and warm. You are disappearing too, though I am afraid that it is I who will vanish first. Your decay is simple, exponential, falling away with a slope so gentle we barely notice it. It will be thousands of years before you are gone. My failings, however, compound by the day.

At the end of the corridor I hear the rattle of the janitor’s keys and the slop of his mop against the floor. I must leave. Clumsily, I wrap you and lay you to rest in your leaden tomb, the one question on my lips, a question that I will ask only once then speak of it no more.

Radium, my child – why bite my fingers so?