Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

She is not a team player, so she has been told on more than one occasion, usually by men who were quite happy to stab someone else in the back so long as the victim wasn’t a member of whatever unspoken brotherhood they all belonged to. But she has run successful groups and the grants have followed her and in the end the world doesn’t give a damn about a few cuts and bruises if it gets a firmer grip on ageing or diabetes, or a clearer picture of how one cell swallowed another and ended up flying to the moon.

Boston was her fourth position as a group leader, running a lab working on the mammalian target of rapamycin complex. Two years in, however, Paul Bachman became the institute’s new director and everything started to turn sour. He brought with him a blank cheque from Khalid bin Mahfouz and instead of supporting the existing faculty went on a global hiring spree. Enter the Golden Boys who deigned sometimes to attend faculty meetings or listen to sub-stellar visiting academics but only as a favour. Paul himself had a house in Bar Harbor and a yacht called Emmeline and a younger wife with a breathtakingly low IQ. Feeling at home wasn’t Carol’s strong suit but under the new dispensation she started to feel like a junior member of the golf club.

In other circumstances she’d have put out feelers, quietly letting colleagues elsewhere know that she had itchy feet. But she’d just met Aysha and, to her astonishment, they were sharing a house, so she knuckled down and put up with the Cinderella treatment.

Eighteen months later, out of nowhere, Aysha said she wanted to get married. Because that’s what loving someone meant, apparently, gathering your families and friends from the four corners of the globe, dressing up, making public vows, getting a signed certificate. Like you hadn’t proved it already by putting up with the subterfuge and the vilification. Carol didn’t understand. The straight world shut you out for two thousand years, the door opened a crack and you were meant to run in and curl up by the fire like grateful dogs. What was wrong with being an outsider? Why this desperate urge to belong to a world which had rejected you?

A year later she and Aysha were no longer sharing a house because…the truth was that she was still not entirely sure. It was the kind of puzzle there was no point trying to solve, the kind of puzzle you didn’t have to solve if you sloughed off all the human mess every few years, trimmed your life down to a few suitcases and headed off for a new skyline, new food, a new language.

Two months of panic and claustrophobia came to an end when Daniel Seghatchian from Berkeley threw her a lifeline, asking if she’d come over and give a chalk talk, meet the faculty, meet the postdocs. Just getting off the plane in California was a relief. Space and sunlight and opportunity. The Q&As were tough but they felt like the respectful aggression meted out to a worthy opponent and by the end of three days the position seemed pretty much in the bag.

She wonders now if the whole thing had been a trap of some kind. Is that possible? Or was it merely her blindness to the allegiances and loyalties and lines of communication upon which others built whole careers?

Her first morning back in Boston she was summoned by Paul who asked what she had against the institute. He didn’t explain how he’d heard the news so quickly. Only later did she realise that he wasn’t asking her what they could do to persuade her to stay. He was giving her enough rope to hang herself. He listened to her diatribe and if she had been a little less exhausted by three days of non-stop thinking she might have asked herself why he seemed untroubled, pleased even. He waited for her to finish then leaned back in his chair and said, “We’ll miss you, Carol.” And only walking away from his office, thinking back to this obvious lie, did she wonder what unseen wheels were turning.

Three days later she got a call from Daniel Seghatchian saying that there was a problem with funding.

“Three minutes of grovelling,” Suzanne said, sitting in her office that lunchtime. “You won’t really mean it. Everyone else will know you don’t really mean it. Paul will know you don’t really mean it. Or, shit, maybe you will mean it. Either way, you go through a little ceremony of obeisance. Kneel before the king. Ask for a pardon. He loves all that stuff.”

Why had that seemed such an impossible thing to do?

After talking to Suzanne she went to the regular meeting with her three postdocs working on the PKCa project. They were in the room that looked onto the little quadrangle with the faux-Japanese garden. Minimal concrete benches, rectangular pond, lilac and callery pear, wind roughening the surface of the water. She was finding it hard to concentrate on what was being said. She was thinking about the last walk she took on Head of the Meadow Beach in Provincetown with Aysha. She was thinking about the humpbacks out on the Stellwagen Bank. Three thousand miles a year, permanent night at forty fathoms, cruising like barrage balloons above the undersea ranges.

Suddenly the room was full of water. Shafts of sunlight hung like white needles from the surface high above her head. Darkness under her feet, darkness all around. Ivan was talking but his voice was tinny and unreal as if he were on a radio link from a long way away. “Breathe,” he was saying. “You have to breathe.” But she couldn’t breathe because if she opened her mouth the water would rush in and flood her lungs.

Finally, despite these churning thoughts she passes into shallow sleep until she comes round just after three on the tail end of a scratchy, anxious dream in which she hears someone entering the house. Unable to sleep without reassuring herself she gets out of bed and goes downstairs to find the living room empty and her mother gone. She runs into the street but it is silent and still. She puts her shoes on, checks the garden then jogs once round the estate’s central triangle calling, “Mum…? Mum…?” as if her mother is a lost dog.

A pack of hooded teenage boys cycle past, slowing to examine her, then sweeping silently onward. She comes to a halt at the junction of Eddar and Grace Roads where the taxi dropped her off forty-eight hours ago. A scatter of lights still burn in Cavendish and Franklin Towers like the open doors in two black Advent calendars. The cherry-red wing tip of a plane flashes slowly across the dirty, starless sky. A dog is barking somewhere. Yap…yap…yap… It is a couple of degrees above freezing, not a good night for an old woman to be outside.

She returns to the house and as she puts the key into the lock she remembers her mother’s story of Jackie Bolton drowning herself in the canal. She puts the key back into her pocket and starts to run. Harrow Road, Eliza Road. A milk float buzzes and tinkles to a halt on Greener Crescent. She is flying, the surface of the world millpond-smooth while everyone sleeps. A fox trots casually out of a gateway and watches her, unfazed. Jerusalem Road. She stops on the little bridge and looks up and down the oily ribbon of stagnant water. Nothing. “Shitting shit.” She walks down the steps onto the gravelled towpath and sees her mother standing on the little strip of weeds and rubble on the far side of the canal. It is like seeing a ghost. The blankness of her mother’s stare, the black water separating them.

“Don’t move.”

She runs down the towpath to a decayed cantilever footbridge. She heaves on the blocky, counterweighted arm and it comes free of the ground, the span bumping down onto the far side of the little bottleneck in the stream. She steps gingerly across the mossy slats, squeezes round a fence of corrugated iron and kicks aside an angry swirl of barbed wire.