Alan Goodwin - Gravity's Chain

The show is all about unity. Unity lies at the heart of Mitchell’s work as a scientist. Superforce unites deep and disparate forces and provides a unifying theory to underpin our science. Clearly his need to bring things together is a much deeper craving than just in science and that is what the show is all about. Pink Floyd rubs shoulders with Eminem; there is even a dash of ELO (if anyone remembers them). There are lasers and lights, a speech from Martin Luther King and poetry from Auden and Owen. All of this and a history of science from Galileo to the present and connections made about how science affects our daily lives.

I learnt a great deal by going to this show. I learnt more about science than I ever did at school and I learnt about the connections between ideas and music and literature. Above all, though, I learnt that Mitchell is selling something a bit different to the world. He is not an ivory tower science nerd and he is more than a mere scientist. He is bringing science out of the cupboard and putting it front of mind and helping us to be less afraid of it on the way. Science is cool—that’s his message.

It is a shame that he only has two shows here, but schedules dictate Mitchell now. I hope he returns soon. I guess at least there will be the DVD in the meantime.

Dear Jack,

I saw your show last night. It certainly was dazzling; you were certainly dazzling. I look at you from the crowd, sometimes I get close and I know you know I’m there and I think how special you’ve become.

You love your science, I know that, but what’s with the show and all those connections? What are you searching for, Jack, because you’re searching for something, aren’t you? Is it to be more famous than Einstein, is that why you talk so much about him? Always straining to be compared with him.

If you really thought you had all the answers with that theory of yours you wouldn’t be out there still searching.

Science doesn’t explain why your wife killed herself, does it? Science doesn’t explain why you loved your lover’s sister. Science doesn’t explain why you gasp at the poetry of Owen, or cry at the art of Michelangelo.

Science doesn’t explain what looks back at you from the mirror in the morning.

The thing is, Jack, I have the answer. Are you willing to find out?

If you’re willing, I’ll be outside your hotel at 11 tomorrow morning.

I hope to see you, Jack.

D ad was in the back garden digging the border at the bottom of the slope. It was cold and I pulled my jacket tight around my body. He was more stooped than I remembered and he appeared to have shrunk. Finally he turned, saw me, drove his spade into the soft earth and waved. How our roles had reversed since he stood where I now was to tell me that Mum was gone. That day I was the one in the garden responding with an innocent wave.

I sat at the kitchen table and watched him potter from cupboard to drawer as he went about the rudiments of making a cup of tea. How many times had I sat at this table and watched his ritual? The teabags, spoon, cup and sugar were all in their unchanged places, but then everything about the kitchen, about the house, was unchanged. It was like a caricature of itself, a sitcom set. ‘My word, that kitchen was so well done, the eye for detail, the formica and browns—oh, and that table.’ At the centre of the table was the wooden fruit bowl I’d made in woodwork the year before Mum left. As usual it contained a couple of spotted bananas and two or three mandarins wrinkled with age. Perhaps the fruit had been there since the day he told me Mum was gone. How he fought himself, trying so hard to keep face, but inside he crumbled. It was like watching an inner-city building being demolished. There’s that moment when all its strength is suddenly gone and it starts its drop. For a fleeting moment it’s still a building, but that’s just an illusion and in seconds it’s nothing more than dust.

I knew every inch of this house. Blindfold me, give me a list of ten items and I’d find them within five minutes. There was a time when this ability confused me, but I’ve worked it all out now: this is the only real home I’ve ever known. There hasn’t been another to interfere with my memory of this one. Sure, I’ve lived in other places, but there’s never been another home. I have a flat in London, but it’s nothing more than a base: it doesn’t even have a television or a sofa. Instead I’ve lived in a steady stream of hotel rooms. I never make a cup of tea and know instinctively where to find the bloody spoon. Sitting at my old kitchen table, where I’d sat all my childhood and youth eating chops, mashed potato and peas, I suddenly realised just how much I’d missed having a home. This was strange because the thought had never crossed my mind before and now in a heartbeat I wanted to change this nomadic life. I wanted a home. I wanted a table with old meal stains and I wanted a drawer with teaspoons.

‘So when are you off?’

‘Tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Finally got round to your dad then?’

‘Come on, Dad, no need for that.’

‘I was beginning to wonder if you’d actually make a visit.’

Perhaps he was right. There was a chance I’d never have come here, but then the Jo debacle happened. All morning I’d battled myself about visiting her in hospital. I simply couldn’t drive poor Jo from my thoughts. I just wanted to know how she was, if she had survived the night. This could have been good old self-preservation. After all, if she died my mess got a whole lot messier, but I think there was some genuine compassion in there as well. But if I went there Bebe would have the right to cut off my balls, roast them and cast them into the sea. I owed Bebe too much to fuck him off again by going to visit Jo.

After Caroline’s death I’d returned home in just the same way as I’d done now. I remember sitting at this same table, unshaven, hungry and thirsty, my head spinning from the germ of spiral maths and the suicide. Dad’s concern extended to his making me a cup of tea with ‘two sugars to keep you going’. After a five-minute silence he pulled out the whisky and we shared two stiff drinks.

‘First Mum, now Caroline,’ I’d said.

‘Don’t blame yourself, son, your mum did what she did for a reason.’ I gave him credit for leaving out speculation about Caroline.

How nice of him to protect Mum, but he didn’t need to. I know I should have blamed her, just as I blamed Caroline for abandoning me. After all, Mum had robbed me of her mothering, and she had robbed me of Dad’s fathering. When she went, she took Dad from me as well. Before she’d left there had been all those shared trips together to the bach and fishing, but that all evaporated. We never landed a snapper together again, never sat in the bach and watched the evening die over the sea. I missed my old dad, the one I’d loved and admired, the man with the swimming togs and the wispy hair at the back of his neck that never seemed to get shaved properly at the barber’s. The one I had now was just a pretend dad. But I never did blame her: it was either my fault or his.

‘I didn’t get to your show, Jack, sorry.’

And so here we were again. Now it was Jo slipping away, but at least she was fighting to stay, unlike Caroline. I hadn’t seen much sign of a fight from her.

‘Probably too loud anyway.’

‘Probably.’

After tea I slipped away to my old room. In the twelve years since I’d left home for Cambridge I’d spent only a handful of nights back here. I sat on the bed. The sheets had probably been unchanged for a year and smelt vaguely damp and musty; I shivered at the thought of sleeping in their clammy hold.

In the wardrobe hung clothes left from my teenage years, a pair of cords and an old green shirt that I always ended up wearing when I went out. On the top shelf was a cardboard box. This was the reason for my return. I placed the box on the bed. It was full of letters, cards and various pieces of paper, all sent by Mary to me in my first year at Cambridge. I pulled the first one from the front, took the pages from the envelope and laid them flat on my knee. The paper was well creased and crinkled when I ironed it flat with the palm of my hand. On the other knee I laid the envelope of the letter sent to me in the hotel. There was no doubt the handwriting was different.