Shape-Shifter (21 page)

Hoodlum, showing major signs of jealousy, let out a loud guffaw. Widdershins shut him up with a glance.

‘As I was saying, matter is just a handy way of collecting atomic and sub-atomic events into packages. And now we’re going to examine your leg in that light.’

‘Couldn’t you put me to sleep with an anaesthetic?’ asked Jane, quailing at the thought.

‘’Fraid not, miss. Consciousness is crucial in quantum mechanics. You’ll have to observe your leg. Unless you see it, it won’t be there, so to speak. Even the tiniest electron can’t really be said to exist until there’s an observer, let alone a whopping great leg.’

Widdershins could no longer contain himself: ‘But surely, at some level quantum physics turns into classical physics?’

‘Who said?’ snapped Afreet.

‘Surely the world enjoys an independent existence, an objective reality in accordance with certain classical laws which it obeys whether there is anyone to observe them or not?’ said Widdershins.

‘It did, Mr Widdershins, until quantum mechanics came along. Now everything’s atoms. Reality is a fuzzy business, Mr Widdershins. I see with my eyes, which are a collection of whirling atoms, through the light, which is a collection of whirling atoms. What do I see? I see you, Mr Widdershins, who are also a collection of whirling atoms. And in all this intermingling of atoms who is to know where anything starts and anything stops. It’s an atomic soup we’re in, Mr Widdershins. And all these quantum limbo states only collapse into one concrete reality when there is a human observer. Like the young lady here. Now then. We have a leg here that is dripping numbers. Do you want me to try and deal with it or not?’

Jane held her hands over her eyes. Widdershins was unable to leave well alone: ‘Einstein,’ he said loftily, ‘believed that there is a reality which we uncover by our observations. He believed in a substratum of deterministic forces that drive the unpredictable hi-jinks of your electrons. He just happened to die before they were discovered.’

The mention of the name Einstein seemed to throw Afreet into a frenzy. He stood up and banged his tool-bag on the ground. Hoodlum backed off into a corner.

‘Einstein,’ he growled. ‘It was his bloody theory that stopped us finding out about faster-than-light signalling. He didn’t know about the conspiracy of particles – what he called “spooky action at a distance”. He didn’t know about enfolded order – space folding and unfolding. He didn’t consider the possibility of multiple universes.’ Afreet began to hop up and down:

‘
LOOK AT THE LEG
,’ he roared. ‘
LOOK AT THE LEG
.’

Just then, Jane felt the tingling in her leg stop, to be replaced by a sensation of unbearable lightness. She took her hands away from her eyes. Below the knee, her leg had no beginning and no end. She saw clearly the same infinite space, the same dizzying void that she had seen once before on a clear winter’s night, the same spiralling galaxies and pendant heavenly bodies that could be either stars or electrons.

Afreet appeared to have recovered his equanimity and was fiddling about with the telescope:

‘I think I’ve got it. I can see the problem way down one end. It’s a black hole.’ He packed up his telescope. Jane kept her eyes averted from the celestial limb.

‘Can you fix it?’ enquired Widdershins, anxiously. ‘Surely you can. After all, as Einst …’ He corrected himself. ‘As somebody said, “God may be subtle, but he’s not malicious”.’ He laughed, nervously.

‘That’s not my experience, Mr Widdershins. In my experience God is extremely malicious. And the answer is “No”. I can’t fix it. As you well know, it is the point where all laws cease.’

Hoodlum let out a whistle, secretly proud of himself for having fucked a woman who contained such lawlessness.

‘The best I can do,’ said Afreet, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, ‘is a Schrodinger’s cat job. And that only has a fifty-fifty chance of success.’

Widdershins swivelled slowly round on his heels from left to right: ‘It’s not very satisfactory,’ he said.

‘It’s the best I can do. She’ll have a fifty per cent chance of living.’

Turning her head to avoid seeing the vertiginous depth that was her leg, Jane determined to exert some control:

‘If I’ve got to take a risk, I want to know the facts,’ she demanded. Patiently, Afreet explained:

‘If I don’t do something, in twelve hours’ time all the atoms of which you are comprised will collapse into that black hole. I can set up a condition whereby either that will happen or you will revert to your former self with your former leg. It’s a quantum superposition of two states – alive and dead. You will be both alive and dead at the same time. Only when a human observer comes and looks in the room will you flip definitively into one of the two states. Hopefully, in your case it will be life. Schrodinger designed the experiment for a cat, originally.’

‘I don’t understand why there needs to be an observer,’ said Jane, angrily. Afreet sighed and scratched his bushy head:

‘Oh dear, I thought you’d understood. Think of tomorrow’s crossword puzzle. The answers to it are already in your head.

But the answers make no sense now, not until the questions are posed. The puzzle brings out one correct answer from the soup of answers in your head. Just the same as the human observer brings out one version of reality.’

‘Why can’t one of you stay and observe me?’

Widdershins intervened delicately:

‘I think that is a question better left aside for the moment.’

‘Well what will it be like to be both alive and dead at the same time?’

‘Horrible,’ said Hoodlum. Widdershins stepped quickly forward nearly tripping over Afreet who was searching for his box of photons.

‘I think, my dear, that it would be rather like a dream. You frequently find such duality in dreams and it is not at all unpleasant. You know that someone is both your father and the newsagent simultaneously. In a dream it would feel quite acceptable to be dead and to be weeding the garden at one and the same time. We can leave a note for your boss asking him to come and wake you. I’m afraid that Hoodlum, Afreet and myself are inveterate gamblers. I hope you will not disappoint us by refusing this option.’

‘I’ve got no choice,’ said Jane and then added, bitterly: ‘I knew mathematics would bring me to this.’

Hoodlum, Widdershins and Afreet looked somewhat abashed. Jane shut her eyes. She heard Afreet whispering something and shutting the tin box. Then the three of them tiptoed out of the room closing the door softly behind them. They left a polite note for Mr Denby explaining that Jane’s alarm clock was not working and would he go up and wake her if she was late for her nine o’clock appointment.

At break of day, three figures could be seen walking through the park, one of medium height, one tall and waving his arms about and the other extremely short. They crossed the grass and disappeared into the dawn mist.

Next morning, Mr Denby arrived to find the salon unopened and Mrs Reynolds waiting outside. After reading the note, he climbed up the stairs and knocked at the door of the flat. There was no reply. He let himself in with the master key. There was no sign of Jane Cole. The divan bed had not been slept in. The remains of a fish supper lay on the table. He noticed a white sock and shoe on the floor next to what looked like a little pile of soot. Then he went back downstairs.

All morning, in the salon, the talk was about the reliability and unreliability of young girls.

LORNA FLED FROM JAMAICA AND CAME TO LIE
in my London flat for a year recovering from Philip who had gone back to his wife. She arrived with two bulging suitcases and chicken-pox:

‘I can’t bear to live on the island while he’s there with her.’ The tears were extraordinary. They spouted from the outermost corners of her eyes. When she blinked they squirted out. She consumed quantities of Frascati wine and swallowed all the pills my doctor could provide. Sometimes I heard her shouting in her sleep. Every so often she managed to haul herself by train to the provincial university where she was completing a thesis on the sugar riots of the thirties. I imagined her, this white-looking creole girl, jolting along in a British Rail compartment that smelled of stale smoke, weeping and puffing at cigarettes and staring out at the grey English weather which she hated. In the end:

‘I’m going back,’ she said.

‘I’m going back too, to Guyana.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I want to see my aunts before they die. They’re old. And I want to spend some time in Georgetown, in the house with Evelyn and the others. I miss the landscape. Perhaps I’ll buy a piece of land there. I don’t know why. I just want to go back.’

‘Eat labba and drink creek water and you will always return’, so the saying goes.

Once I dreamed I returned by walking in the manner of a high-wire artist, arms outstretched, across a frail spider’s thread suspended sixty feet above the Atlantic attached to Big Ben at one end and St George’s Cathedral, Demerara, at the other. It took me twenty-two days to do it and during the whole of that time only the moon shone.

Another time, my dream blew me clean across the ocean like tumbleweed. That took only three days and the sun and the moon shone alternately as per usual.

We do return and leave and return again, criss-crossing the Atlantic, but whichever side of the Atlantic we are on, the dream is always on the other side.

I am splashing in the waters of the lake at Suddie. The waters are a strange reddish colour, the colour of Pepsi-Cola and the lake is fenced in with reeds. The sky is a grey-blue lid with clouds in it – far too big for the lake. Opposite me on the far side, an Amerindian woman sits motionless in the back of a canoe wedged in the reeds. She is clutching a paddle.

They say that the spirit of a pale boy is trapped beneath the waters of one of the creeks nearby. You can see him looking up when sunlight penetrates the overhanging branches and green butterfly leaves, caught between the reflections of tree roots that stretch like fins from the banks into the water.

‘So you’re going back to the West Indies,’ says the man at the party, in his blue and white striped shirt. ‘I was on holiday in Montego Bay last year. How I envy you. All those white beaches and palm trees.’

But it’s not like that, I think to myself. It’s not like that at all. I think of Jamaica with its harsh sunlight and stony roads. Everything is more visible there, the gunmen, the politics, the sturdy, outspoken people. And I think of the Guyanese coast, with its crab-infested mud-flats and low trees dipping into the water.

‘You’ve got all that wonderful reggae music too,’ the man is saying. But I don’t bother to put him right because the buzz of conversation is too loud.

The pale boy’s name is Wat. He is standing on the deck of a ship at anchor in the estuary of a great river, screwing up his eyes to scan the coast. The boards of the deck are burning hot underfoot. The sun pulverises his head. His father, leader of the expedition, comes over to him and puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder:

‘At last we have found entry into the Guianas,’ he says.

Wat’s heart beats a little faster. This is it. Somewhere in the interior they will find Manoa which the Spaniards call El Dorado. They will outdo the feats of Cortes and Pizarro. They will discover

The mountain of crystal

The empire where there is more abundance of gold than in Peru

The palaces that contain feathered fish, beasts and birds, all fashioned in gold by men with no iron implements

The pleasure gardens with intricate replicas of trees, herbs and flowers, all wrought in silver and gold.

He gazes eagerly ahead. There is mud, green bush, river and more bush stretching as far as the eye can see. And there are no seagulls. Unlike the coast of England where the birds had shrieked them such a noisy farewell, this coast is utterly silent.

The body of an Amerindian is falling through the mists, a brown leaf curling and twisting downwards until it reaches the earth with a thud like fruit.

A low mournful hoot signals the departure of the SS
Essequibo
as it steams out of the Demerara into the Atlantic.

A young man of twenty-one braces himself against the rail taking deep breaths of the future. There is not much of the African left in his appearance, a hint of it perhaps in the tawny colour of a complexion mixed over generations with Scottish, Amerindian and Portuguese. He lets go of the rail and strolls towards the prow of the ship. His eyes never leave the horizon. Not once does he look back as the land recedes away behind him, because

In England there is a library that contains all the books in the world, a cathedral of knowledge the interior of whose dome shimmers gold from the lettering on spines of ancient volumes.

In England there are theatres and concert halls and galleries hung from ceiling to floor with magnificent gold-framed paintings and all of these are peopled by men in black silk opera hats and women with skins like cream of coconut.

In England there are museums which house the giant skeletons of dinosaurs whose breastbones flute into a rib-cage as lofty and vast as the stone ribs inside Westminister Abbey, which he has seen on a postcard.

This is what will happen.

He will disembark in the industrial docks of Liverpool to the delicious shock of seeing, for the first time, white men working with their hands.

For a year he will study law at the Inns of Court in London.

In the Great War of Europe, two of the fingers of his left hand will be torn off by shrapnel. A bluish wound will disfigure the calf of his leg. The thundering of the artillery will render him stone deaf in one ear and after a period of rehabilitation in Shorncliffe, Kent, he will be returned to his native land where his mother, brothers and sisters wait for him on the verandah. He brings with him a letter signed by the King of England which his mother frames and hangs in the living-room. It says:

‘A Grateful Mother Country Thanks You For Your Sacrifice.’

They are drenched with spray, Wat, his father and six of the crew, clinging to the rocks at the base of the giant falls of Kaeitur, a waterfall so enormous that it makes the sound of a thousand bells as the column of water falls thousands of feet to the River Potaro below. Each one of them is exhausted, but above all, perplexed. For two weeks they have travelled up river led by an Arawak guide. Before they set off they explained carefully to him through an interpreter that they were seeking the mountain of crystal. And this is where he has brought them.