Alan Goodwin - Gravity's Chain

Once home I took to my sick bed and feigned illness. I lay awake all night practising what I should say. And as always happens when things are put off, it became more and more difficult to see how I could broach the subject with her. The next day I avoided seeing her by saying I was unwell. Mary rang constantly to check on my progress and said she counted the hours before seeing me. Then suddenly the calls stopped.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, pondering whether to eat one of Dad’s shrivelled oranges, when Caroline appeared at the door. Dad was in the garden and I could hear his tuneless whistle through the open back door. Caroline could barely contain her excitement and neither could I: it was the first time we’d met since that afternoon. If there were any doubts about what I’d done, they dissipated in that electric moment when I saw her and remembered in one charged pulse all we had done. It was an overload to the emotion circuit and for a brief second I felt light-headed. Caroline had just come from Mary. She had told her what had happened, she had told her about the reconfigured future. I thought Caroline would be angry for having had to take matters in hand, but she wasn’t. Far from it, I think she saw the delivery of such news as her responsibility.

How did I feel? Relief. I should have felt guilty about what we’d done to Mary, but I actually experienced a more mundane guilt about not having been the one to tell her. My thoughts curled in a curious and unexpected way. Not telling her was a lesser crime than being unfaithful. I was left insulated from the effects of what had happened, insulated from the pain I had caused. If I avoided the effects of my actions I avoided unpleasant consequences. What a heady lesson.

In my remaining weeks in New Zealand I moved the meagre possessions I had with me to Caroline’s home and stayed with her. After just three days she told me she was coming to Cambridge with me and had spent her last thousand dollars on the ticket. There was no hope of us staying at Mrs Grey’s—she was fierce at keeping women from her bastion—so I packed my bags and we rented the cheapest bed-sit we could find in Trumpington, on the outskirts of the city. I had my old Escort and its temperamental starter motor as transport. Caroline found a part-time job as a waitress and I settled into my second year of university. I seldom thought of Mary in those first few months, seldom wondered what she thought of me or how she was. It wasn’t until summer that she wrote.

For the last two days a strong summer heat had blasted the city and a summer malaise settled over its inhabitants. The holidays had started and Cambridge entered its yearly metamorphosis from university town to tourist Mecca. Only a few of the international students like me remained. The shaggy, bearded, head-down and shoulder-hunched young had given way to tourists who shuffled their way round the sights, clicking their cameras for photographs that most would see only once, then consign to a bottom drawer. Little else moved in the heat. It was a typical English summer, I was told: weeks of threatening wind and clouds suddenly turned hot as if a switch had been thrown. The concrete and asphalt absorbed the heat and spat it out like a giant reflector.

Caroline and I retreated to our room. The bed-sit was hardly big enough for a pygmy, let alone two adults. The velvet sofa and the heavy wooden table under a bay window took most of the available space. A tiny kitchen alcove occupied one side of the room, complete with an old enamel sink and a gas water heater that burst to life when water was run with the ferocity of an Apollo rocket. I doubted it had passed any safety test and scorch marks around the hole where the flame could be spied spoke of years of neglect. On the other side of the room a Japanese painted screen hid the bed from view.

In New Zealand, heat like this felt clean and fierce. In Cambridge it felt dirty as though it carried the vestiges of muck and dirt collected on a journey through many cities. In New Zealand the sea purifies the heat but the North Sea is no match for the Pacific. We had talked about returning home in the two-month summer break but we didn’t have the money and, anyway, what was there to return to? We weren’t exactly going to be welcomed into the bosom of Caroline’s loving family. As for Dad, I’m not sure he even realised I’d returned to England. So we camped inside, stripped to our underwear, sweated and sat lifelessly. Occasionally we shared a cold bath in the communal bathroom. The bath had a tidemark so dark it looked as though a marker pen had been used. Hair of many heads and body parts were smeared on most surfaces.

It was during these days that we took serious drugs for the first time. We’d smoked dope every week, but on the first night of the heatwave Caroline brought home tablets, a lot of tablets. We broke into our supply of booze to help them on their way. With the hot weather forecast for the week we hunkered down and got serious. Just how many drugs would it take for us to depart the mother ship? Days and nights lost their division and became almost one, distinguishable only by the degree of heat. Boundaries melted and every time elements of normality returned we popped some tablets and drank more tequila.

On the third day Caroline drew as though her very life depended on producing a great picture every hour. She scattered paper on the tiny floor space, across the bed and over the table and sweated so heavily with her effort her hair looked as though she’d just showered. In the middle of her frenzy she pushed everything she’d accumulated on the table to the floor and insisted I sit and work, but before I could start she gave me tablets and challenged me to abandon all assumptions. For hours I sat at the great wooden table and played with equations over and over until I felt a loss of control, until the maths seemed to take on a life of its own, spilling out of me and refusing to stop, even when it became so weird I got quite scared. Only the next day, during a period of near lucidity when I read what I’d done, did I realise just how far I’d pushed myself and how crazy some of the ideas were. But I saw something among the tangle of equations—words and sayings that immediately caught my breath. But almost as suddenly they were gone. My mind was so tired I just couldn’t hold the revelation. However, I knew the insight was unnervingly different and that something fundamentally new could be born. I had no idea it would take years of frustration to find it again.

The day after our creative burst was a day of rest, and that was when Mary’s letters arrived.

Caroline stirred on the sofa. ‘We have to write back.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t you see? It’s just us now, Jack, us against the world. We don’t need anyone and they don’t need us, so let’s tell them.’

‘There’s no need. Mary knows what she thinks. Why bother to say any more?’

‘It’s not for her, Jack.’

‘So who is it for then?’

‘Us, of course, it’s for us. As long as we remain silent there’s always the base for a bridge to be built, but I don’t want there to be the chance of any bridges, so let’s destroy the base, let’s fucking rip it apart.’

‘Are you sure?’

She scrambled from the sofa and stood in front of me wearing just bra and pants. Her body was so taut it looked magnificent and her eyes bulged so wide I thought they might pop out of her head. A fresh sweat formed on her brow and nose, or was that a tear—yes, I think a tear. ‘It’s just us, Jack, and let me tell you, together we’re going to do great things.’ She held out her hands as if showing the length of a recently caught fish, then extended them as wide as they could go. ‘Great things, and we don’t need anyone to help us. So let’s cut ourselves free, let’s tell Mary what we think.’ She went to the table and started writing so fast and furiously that the felt-tip pen began squeaking.