Gravity's Chain (14 page)

C
aroline, you should have a look at this…oh God, she's really hurting.'

‘Who?'

‘Mary, she's written a letter.' I held out the three pages like Neville Chamberlain with his Munich peace papers. ‘It's her farewell statement to us.' Caroline sat next to me, indifferent. ‘You should read this, it's really awful.'

‘What did you expect?' She sat with one foot curled under her bottom as though nurturing it for hatching.

‘Read it.'

‘I don't want to.' She uncurled her leg and stretched the stiffness from her knee and ankle. She fetched a cigarette packet and ashtray from the table then, hips swaying, returned to the old sofa. She had slimmed down since we'd first met: a student diet and English winter had taken their toll. Our sofa sank in the middle where its springs were broken and the brown velvet covering was worn bare. When Caroline sat next to me we rolled together. I enjoyed the sudden contact.

‘Aren't you curious about what she says?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘I got my own letter.'

‘When?'

‘Today. I just didn't want to share it with you.' She registered my astonishment, took the letter, read it and replaced it in my unmoved hand. When she sat back, the movement released an old musty smell from deep within the bowels of the sofa and her nostrils flared. A look of momentary disgust darkened her face. This was a familiar look brought on by our bed-sit. But when she saw my frown, she smiled and touched my cheek with the palm of her hand. ‘Does it worry you what she says? Are you hurt?'

‘No, I'm not worried, not hurt.'

‘You shouldn't be. She didn't understand you and so the two of you were doomed. It was just a matter of time. Now she's just being petty and pathetic. Worse than pathetic actually.'

‘Do you feel any guilt, Caroline?'

‘No. What happened was meant to be, Jack. There was no hope for the two of you. It was just a matter of time.'

‘But she's your sister. Don't you feel anything, don't you feel any pain?'

‘She's not my sister any more. I've disowned her and it's mutual.'

‘How can you say that?'

‘It's in my letter. Yours is mild in comparison to mine, she saved the best for me. Well, that's fine, I want nothing more to do with her and she wants nothing more to do with me. It's all right, Jack, there's no need to look so worried. We've all made our choices and now we move on. What's gone is gone—Mary's gone. All that remains is for me to now tell her how I feel.'

I nuzzled into her shoulder. The sofa smell was replaced with
the sweeter scent of her perfume. In the eight months since the afternoon in her Titirangi house I'd been with her almost every day, yet my feelings for Caroline were as fresh as if we'd just met.

That day in Titirangi. When I left, dazed and tired, my senses worn to bursting, I knew things were different. Something very large had shifted inside as though someone had entered my head and rearranged the furniture. The walls were the same, but everything else was different. I knew immediately what had to happen: I needed to go straight to Mary, confess, end it with her and accept the consequences. There was pain to experience, anger to negotiate and all the shit you get when you hurt someone as deeply as they can be hurt. I should have been exposed to all that. I should have witnessed all I was responsible for. But halfway there I lost my nerve and returned home instead. Through a torrid rainstorm, with the old wipers of my father's car failing to clear the deluge, I convinced myself it was best that I went home and saw Mary another day. I ran away and no amount of tinsel could alter that fact.

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.

I poured a tequila and reread Mary's letter. The sour taste of the drink turned my stomach and sent a shiver through my body. I almost pined for the chance to vomit and rid my body of the accumulated poisons of the past days. Such vomit would carry an awful taste of old alcohol and maybe a taste never to be forgotten. For long seconds I teetered on the edge of a future abstinence. The room felt more oppressive than at any time during the heat wave and I felt sweat trickle down my trunk and between my thighs. I squirmed as the threadbare patch of the sofa chafed the undersides of my legs. What mischief had this sofa seen over the years of student tenants? The mere thought of what might have lived here before added to my discomfort, but I lacked the energy to move. I continued to sit and suffer. Caroline's breathing sounded raucous in the quiet of the room, so raucous I almost begrudged her the air she breathed. It was too hot even for the birds to sing. My stomach continued to rebel at the thought of the drink I still held in my hand. I raised it to my lips. The smell was almost enough to make me retch, but I forced the glass up and drained the liquid. The revulsion in my stomach calmed and I poured another drink, swallowing it more greedily than the first.

‘There.' Caroline's voice contained a heady note of triumph. ‘You read this, Jack. I'm going to get dressed and then I'm going straight out to post it.'

After reading her letter I let out a long heavy sigh. I don't
think I could have written such words to my most hated enemy. Everything Caroline had said to me was there, plus much, much more. Sister told sister that she'd never loved her and that she'd vowed to take what was most precious to her. That, of course, had proved to be me. Was that all I was to Caroline—a prize with which to wound her sister, or were they just words to ensure there was no chance of reconciliation between them? I didn't know how much of this was true. I imagined poor Mary reading the words. What had she ever done to deserve this?

I heard the closing of a drawer and swearing from the space behind the screen where Caroline had gone to get changed. Quickly I grabbed a pen from the table and wrote at the bottom of the page:
I'm sorry, Mary. Keep strong.
Before Caroline returned I put the pages in the envelope she'd already addressed and sealed the flap.

‘Thanks,' she said without suspicion. She took the envelope and left the flat. I poured another drink and returned to the sofa. I'd committed my crime against Caroline—I'd broken ranks, I'd left a crack. I don't think I could really have done anything worse. How strange, I'd never thought how Mary might have felt for what I'd done to her, but I felt the pain from what her sister was saying. Was I in some way immune to my own wrongs, but not others'?