Alan Goodwin - Gravity's Chain

The girls settled down for some serious tanning and the boys for some casual appraising. Jo knew she looked good. There was something in the way she tensed her legs and lay with one angled up, the knee jutting toward the sky. She was the only one of the three without sunglasses and whenever I walked past she’d look at me, one eye closed against the glare of the sun. Did she still like me? I was afraid to find out for fear of rejection. Helen was squatter and chunkier and already her thighs were heavy, like those of a middle-aged woman with dimples of cellulite. Then there was Mary. I’d never noticed her grace before, never seen the length of her limbs and her subtle movements. There on the beach, Mary Roberts strolled out of the shadows like a panther emerging from a dark forest.

We had talked about the first evening for weeks and in the days before we had all endlessly run through in our minds just what it would be like. We ate fish and chips, we drank beer and then wine, and we smoked dope. Once the sunset came, Mary lit candles that she’d brought with her in an old cardboard box and placed all around the front room. She had saved them for years. The evening settled down after the initial burst of excitement. The jokes faded and the drink and drugs bit.

‘How do you feel about Cambridge, Jack?’ Helen sat on the floor, like a sleeping cat at my feet. She sipped from a beer can without looking up.

‘Fine.’

‘Oh come on,’ Mike snorted as he came from the downstairs bedroom where he and I were sleeping carrying his guitar, ‘you’re going to one of the greatest universities in the world where they think you’re a bloody paid-up member of the genius club and all you can say is fine?’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Do you think you’ll miss home?’ Mary sat furthest from me, her face hidden in shadows, her voice soft and comforting.

‘I guess so, yes.’

Mike plucked a spliff from Jo’s hand, took a deep puff and passed it to me before picking up his guitar and sliding it on his lap. ‘Two weeks there and you won’t even remember New Zealand, and you won’t fucking remember us either. You’ll have a bloody amazing time.’

‘Maybe, but I’ll miss you lot.’

There was a moment’s silence before a chorus of catcalls and raspberries filled the room. Mike strummed the first four chords of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and then suddenly stopped as a wide grin crossed his face. ‘Tell me, Jack,’ he said as he twanged three notes, one for every word, ‘what is 321,640 divided by 618?’ He barked the numbers like a sergeant major on the training ground. Everyone turned to me. This was a favourite party piece.

‘Easy, 520.453.’

‘My God, how do you do that,’ squealed Jo, who hadn’t seen this before. ‘Can you do it again?’

There was silence. ‘You have to give me some numbers,’ I said to her, half laughing.

‘Oh yeah, right…62,220 times 115.’

‘7,155,300.’ Mike strummed his guitar in time with my rhythmic answer.

‘Square root of 426,000?’

‘652.687.’

They all cheered and laughed. Mike broke the silence with ‘She Loves You’, which we all sang at the top of our voices, shaking our heads wildly at the ‘ooohhh’.

We sang for an hour. At the end Mary gave me the sunniest smile of the evening: her face opened up and the joy poured out like a torrent and I knew it was just for me. It churned my guts, that bloody smile, like the sweetest dose of food poisoning any man could have. When she turned away, the smile vanished and her face closed down, but I’d glimpsed her inner happiness for one brief searing moment and it was beautiful. She was beautiful. I’d never seen that in a human before, so I knew I was privileged, and I yearned for it again the moment it was gone.

The evening grew colder and we dispersed for jumpers and sweatshirts. On the way past Jo’s room, she called me in. ‘Hi Jack, how’s it going?’

‘Getting pretty hammered actually.’

‘I never realised just how fucking brilliant you were. I mean you hear about it and everyone says it, but to see that, wow.’

‘It’s no more than a trick really.’

‘No it’s not—you wouldn’t be going to Cambridge if it was just a trick. Is it right you were chosen from hundreds around the world for this scholarship?’

‘Yes.’

‘Never seen anything like it. Physics at Cambridge, that’s something else.’ She was sitting on the end of her bed and she bent down to tie a shoelace that looked tied. The loose shirt she was wearing fell open. She wore no bra and I could see her breasts: how funny, I thought, that I’d felt but never seen them. When she stood up she smiled, though it was a poor imitation of Mary’s earlier brilliance; however, there were those breasts.

‘Come on, guys,’ Duncan came to the doorway, ‘it’s drinking game time.’

‘Be there in a sec,’ Jo replied and bent again, this time to collect her jumper from the floor. With Duncan at the door she was careful to hold her top tight to her body, thus preventing any sight of her breasts and to make clear the earlier view was for my benefit only.

I don’t know who invented the form of alcoholic torture known as drinking games, but Mike must have read the book because he seemed to know them all and he unleashed a whole assortment of them. He won every game. He was a master and when finished he surveyed the drunken human wreckage with a quiet satisfaction. In the early morning I found myself sprawled on the grass bank that led to the beach, completely ignorant of how I got there. I lay back and let the wind cool my face. The sound of the surf in the distance was a welcome reminder that somewhere beyond my assaulted senses was the real world and that if I hung on long enough I might just make it back there. Stars spun in and out of sight like a kaleidoscope and the earth rotated ten times faster than I remembered. I gripped tufts of grass so I wouldn’t whirl off into space. I have no idea how long this state lasted—it could have been five minutes, or maybe two hours—but the next time my senses reconnected with my surroundings there was some improvement in that the world had slowed down and I no longer felt in danger of falling off. My stomach and head ached, but I was confident of seeing another morning.

My new reality was filled with the unmistakable sound of puking—and it was bad. This was no delicate vomit but a huge, gut-wrenching evacuation. It just went on and on, seemingly with no end, and so guttural were the noises there was no way of telling the gender of the victim. With some effort I hauled myself to unsteady feet and eventually found Mary on the other side of the house, leaning against a wall with one arm at an extraordinary angle. She retched as I approached, but clearly her stomach was empty and nothing came up except the smallest dribble. I went inside. Jo and Duncan had passed out on the floor, Helen was half on the sofa and Mike was presumably safely tucked up in bed. With a glass of water that I managed to half empty on the steps I returned to the hapless Mary who stood in the exact same pose except her body had slumped further, forcing her arm out at an even more acute angle.

‘Here, have some of this.’ I held the glass in front of her, but she ignored the invitation and just swayed. ‘Drink,’ I commanded as I put the glass to her lips and tipped it back. Automatically she drank, although most of the water dribbled down her front. Gently I pulled her arm from the wall. She stumbled as the weight balance changed and I held on to her as she shuffled her feet to avoid the inevitable fall. Again I held the glass to her lips and this time she drained what remained as though she’d been stranded in the desert for days. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I urged and, holding her hand, guided Mary down the bank and onto the beach.