The lancet liver fluke is a microscopic parasitic flatworm that turns ants into zombies. An ant accidentally eats a fluke and the parasite migrates to the ant’s brain where it heads to the central nervous system and takes control. The fluke causes the infected ant to climb to the top of a blade of grass and perch there, dreamily awaiting its death. When cattle or sheep come to graze, they eat the grass together with the ant, and the fluke worm settles into the larger animal’s liver, doing terrible damage. A few months ago, I became convinced that one of these tiny demon parasites had migrated to the brain of my best friend, Pete.
This was my second hypothesis.
My first was that he was the subject of the other type of fluke. When he fell off a ladder while painting his bedroom ceiling, I thought he’d been clumsy. When the very same week he fell out of a tree in his garden while trying to rescue his cat, I joked: “Third time lucky, eh, Pete?” The third time happened just five days later. Rather than call the maintenance people, Pete decided to walk out onto his roof with a mop and bucket to clean his solar panels. The wet panels were very slippery. Pete missed his footing, fell and slithered uncontrollably off the roof into the branches of the same tree the cat had got stuck in. That was the first time I mentioned the word ‘fluke’ — not as in a parasitic worm, but as in an unlikely chance occurrence, or a surprising piece of luck: three nasty falls and all Pete had to show for it were a few scratches. A fluke indeed!
It worried me that Pete wasn’t heeding these clear cosmic warnings. Surely someone who had fallen three times in less than a fortnight would start avoiding high places. Not Pete. Whenever I mentioned that his good luck might run out, he just chuckled and smiled dreamily. That was when I began to wonder if something was wrong with him.
After the incident with the solar panels, Pete fell from a second storey window while trying to clean the glass on the outside. He slipped from a clifftop path while walking along the coast on a particularly windy day. He took another dive from his roof while trying to reorientate his satellite dish and he fell out of another tree — this time while trying to reach the ripest cherries on the topmost branches.
This last accident dislocated his shoulder and I really thought he’d start to see sense. But when I warned him that he should be more careful, he just smiled again and said: “You know what, I’ve decided I really like climbing. I love being up there above the world. I’m thinking of doing a free-climbing course.”
“Don’t do it, mate!” I urged. “Think of all the near misses you’ve had. It’s a fluke that you’re still alive.”
A few hours later I learned the other definition of ‘fluke’ and formed my second hypothesis. I was watching a nature documentary on TV and the name ‘lancet liver fluke’ caught my attention, because I’d used that very word with Pete not long before. When I saw the ant on my TV screen, hanging dreamily from a tall blade of grass waiting to be eaten, I had a sudden vision of Pete danglingfrom the branch of a tree. “Oh my God,” I chuckled aloud — at this point I was still laughing — “a fluke worm has got into Pete’s brain!”
But the funny side quickly disappeared. Pete was arrested twice for scaling the fire escapes of tall buildings in the middle of the night. Another time he was caught trying to climb up the suspension cables of Tower Bridge. Fortunately, some tourists dragged him off before he could get too far. That time he was almost sectioned, but I didn’t believe Pete’s mental health was the problem. I was convinced the culprit was the lancet liver fluke. According to the internet, the fluke doesn’t bother with human brains, it goes straight to the liver and victims suffer from hepatitis-like symptoms. Admittedly, Pete had none of those, but the faraway expression that came over his face whenever he talked about his various escapades, his mesmerised climbing, made me think of that ant on my TV screen.
Unfortunately, we will never know the truth, as Pete’s body has never been found. On his final climb he managed to scale the central pylon of the London cable car at Greenwich. He’d gone very early in the morning and climbed all the way to the top. I imagine him smiling as he watched the sun rise over London’s East End. I know he was smiling, because the tourists who came up in the first cable car later described it: Pete’s euphoric face as he swung out in front of them, seconds before their cable car, obdurate and glassy-eyed like a mechanical sheep, smashed into him, knocking him into the Thames.
