Gravity's Chain (13 page)

‘Hospital.'

‘Will she live?'

‘That's in God's hands now.'

He noticed the glass and picked it up with the tip of his finger and thumb as though it contained a dog turd. ‘What an earth were you doing last night?'

‘Just having some fun.'

‘Going fishing with a friend is having fun, going to a sports game with your son is having fun, listening to music and having a dance is having fun, but an orgy with a Russian hooker and an old school friend while taking enough cocaine to keep Napoleon's army going isn't having fun. It's called destroying your life, and it's bloody senseless. You've gone too far this time, Jack. She might die.'

‘I know and I feel awful.'

‘Awful? Awful? Is that all you can say? I'll tell you something, Jack—you're coming apart at the seams. Paranoid stories about being followed, sex, drugs and drink out of control…' He was crying as he spoke. ‘You have so many gifts. I'd cut off my left leg for a fraction of your talent, but what do you do with it all? You give up work and slowly destroy yourself and everything you've worked for.'

‘I can't work, Bebe, there's nothing left for me. I've achieved my peak and I know I'll never come close again. Even if I work for a hundred years I can't touch what I've done. Everything seems so bloody mundane in comparison. There's nothing left for me, Bebe, nothing.'

‘The company has to know about this. You have no idea what I've had to do to sort this out.' He pulled a tissue from the box beside his bed and dabbed his eyes. ‘I don't know what's going to happen, Jack.'

‘Thank you, Bebe. Thank you for helping.'

‘I did it for the girl, I did it for myself,' he lied.

‘I know—thank you for helping her. I'm sure she'll pull through and she'll owe her life to you. That is something to really be proud of, Bebe, a real achievement that matters, not some fantasy like mine.'

He stopped crying. ‘I've cancelled today's press meetings—I said you were unwell. Jack, will you promise me something? Will you promise to get some help when we get back to England? Will you see someone about what troubles you so much?'

I dropped my head and sat silently.

‘You can't even do that, can you? At such a desperate moment as this you can't seek help.'

‘There's something that just drives me to it, Bebe, and I don't know that I want it to stop.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because without it there would just be this fucking huge ugly void and I'm scared of it. At least I know about the drink and the sex.'

‘How ironic that you're afraid of the unknown when your work takes everyone else there.'

‘Can I go back to my room now, please?'

No one would have imagined what had happened in the room just hours before. The bed was made, the room tidied and cleaned, and all previously scattered possessions in their rightful place. I avoided asking Bebe how he'd sorted this problem, how he'd turned the clock back and manufactured a different outcome to protect me. How much had Claudia's disappearance upset his plans? It was best I didn't know. It didn't stop me speculating, though. I bet he engineered the finding of Jo's body in another
room. The hotel would have been compliant: after all, they wouldn't want any bad publicity and there would have been the offer of some future Taikon conference to smooth the changed records required to cover up the story and sever any connection with Jo. Everything would be taken care of, everything except Claudia, of course. Thanks to me, Claudia was still free.

Slowly late afternoon invaded the room, casting shadows on the furniture. I tried sleeping, but it was impossible. Jo's lifeless face and fragments of the night before forced themselves on me. Somehow I had to get away. I dressed and walked the waterfront for an hour. The evening was cool and thick cloud pressed down on the horizon. A guard walked with me and I pulled my hat low to avoid recognition. I felt hunted, as though everyone on the street knew what I'd done. It might not be long before they actually did know. Could one of them be my stalker? The thought made me angry.

When I returned to the hotel, the manager passed me an envelope. In my room I sat on a chair I was sure Jo had never used and read the letter at least six or seven times. The night was almost on me and I let the room darken until I could no longer read.

THE NEW ZEALAND HERALD

A Star So Bright

So finally Jack Mitchell has returned home to New Zealand—and what a homecoming. His show at the Aotea Centre last night was a stunning experience. Part rock star, part bar lounge crooner, part sex symbol and total genius, Mitchell had it all. And he held the audience spellbound for nearly ninety minutes.

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.

I should have finished there. I should have slipped the pages back and put the box in the wardrobe to wait for another God knows how many years before I returned to look at them again. It wouldn't have been hard. Clumsily I withdrew one of the letters, all fingers and thumbs as though picking an index card from a filing drawer.

When I was away, Mary wrote frantically as though it was her job and failure to send a regular letter was a disciplinary offence
leading to dismissal. How I treasured them, reading every line over and over as I sat in the freezing front room of Mrs Grey's home. In the summer I'd read them as I sat in the evening sun listening to blackbirds singing in the garden. The future seemed so simple back then, mapped out and manageable, all boxed up and ready to go. An academic career, a settled, ordered life and my first girlfriend who I thought would be a wife. I was at ease with my talents. However, that was before Caroline. She saw what was inside me and picked it out like the most skilful oystercatcher prizing open a shell. Mary thought the shell beautiful and was happy to look at the outside; Caroline wanted the pearl.

I pulled the pages from the envelope. The paper, creamy and thick, was different from all the others. This letter was from a different era. I read the painfully familiar lines, not even realising I was crying until the first tear dropped from the end of my nose.

Jack,

So finally I'm able to write. The last time I wrote to you was a week before you were due to return from Cambridge at the end of last year. It was an exciting time; I don't think I'd ever looked forward to something quite as much as the thought of you arriving at the airport. I went to sleep thinking of that moment and awoke with the very same thought. Whenever I look back at what has happened I find it so ironic that, having survived all those months apart, everything should go wrong within just two weeks of your
return. Perhaps there's something meaningful or symbolic about that, but I'll leave that to you, because I'm probably too stupid to recognise whatever it is.

I have written this letter a hundred times in my head and started almost as many times on paper. Always I've tried to avoid clichés, but I'm sorry, I can't so you'll just have to put up with the obvious. I think you might owe me that at least. There's no other way to say you've broken my heart, because that's what you've done, Jack—you've broken my heart. It goes without saying that I'll never forgive you or Caroline. I just wish I knew why you did this to me. Did you think we could still all be friends? Did she think sisterly love (yeah, some joke, I know) would see us all through these ‘difficult times'?

Well it won't.

Nothing you say, or do, can ever heal my pain. Oh yes, I can just see the two of you, sitting in Cambridge (yes, I do know that much), in your sophisticated love nest, laughing at me as you read this. Mocking me as you have some high-level ‘intellectual' discussion about silly old Mary. After all, the two of you are soooo mature and worldly. It must be lonely on that mountaintop. What was it Caroline said? ‘You must realise, Mary, Jack lives on another level, and he
needs someone to nurture him.' She didn't say that I was unable to do that for you, but then she didn't need to—did she? The two of you had made that bloody obvious.

The mature thing to do would be to wish you well, but I don't wish you well—so I'm NOT going to say it. In fact, I'm not sure what it is I wish you. My thoughts swing from the evil to the weird, from some strange kindness because of what we once had, to hate, but in the end it will do me no good to wish you ill, so I leave it in some kind of neutral.

I wish so much that none of this had happened. It's probably my fault for mapping out such a detailed future for us so early on. Perhaps our foundations weren't strong enough. But all the time we were together it all felt so good and so right. Whatever else happens in life I do know that some-how this first love will have been the best.

This is the last letter I shall write to you. I'd like to think it would be the last time we'll ever be in contact, but somehow I know that's not going to be the case. Our paths will cross, Jack. Our paths will cross again.

The question is: who will be the sadder that day?

Mary