The Universe Versus Alex Woods (26 page)
Warmest regards,
Monica Weir
From: [email protected]
Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 3:15 PM
Subject: RE: RE: Meteorite
Dear Dr Weir,
Thank you for your suggestions. You can call the Natural History Museum straight away and make whatever arrangements are necessary. I appreciate why you think I should take a few days to think things over, but, as I’ve said, I’ve already thought matters through very carefully over the past few months, and I’m quite certain that this is what I want to do. It’s the right time for me.
As for how much my meteorite might be worth, this doesn’t really matter too much as I know I could never bring myself to sell it. It would feel like a betrayal, if that makes sense. The best analogy I can draw is that I’d never, ever sell my cat either – but I could let her go free to a good home if that was the best thing for her, especially if I could still visit every once in a while. I hope this clears things up to your satisfaction.
Regarding coming to London to deliver the meteorite ‘in person’ – I’d very much like to visit the museum because I’ve never been before. (I went on the website after your email, of course, and it looks like a fascinating place.) However, I’d rather there wasn’t any publicity or media – at least, not during my visit. If the museum wants to put something on their website, then that’s okay, but perhaps this can be delayed until after I’ve been and gone?
As I mentioned, the date I had in mind was 20 June. It seems fitting. And since it’s a Saturday, I won’t need to take any time off school. Could you ask the museum if this date is okay for them? And, of course, I’d like it if you could be there too – so long as it’s convenient.
The only problem I can foresee for myself is that it’s very unlikely that my mother will be able to bring me to London. Saturday is always an extremely busy day for her – especially in the summer. Also, she has to get up before dawn the next day for the solstice. However, I’m sure that someone will be able to give me a lift to Bristol Temple Meads, and from there it’s only one hour forty-five minutes to London Paddington. But I think someone might have to meet me there as I’ve never been to London and I don’t know my way around. I’ve been looking at maps of the Underground, but I’m not one hundred per cent sure I understand how it works. Perhaps you could send me directions? The forums I’ve been on haven’t been very helpful.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Yours sincerely,
Alex Woods
Following Dr Weir’s directions, I took a series of escalators down into Paddington Tube Station – which really
was
shaped like a tube – and then caught a train southbound on the Circle line and got off at South Kensington. As she’d promised the museums – the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum – were clearly signposted along the underpass, and once I was back above ground, I swiftly identified the NHM as the building to my right. It was a very large, sandy-coloured oblong – approximately the same hue as a hen’s egg – with many windows and decorative arches, and two turrets rearing in the distance. It looked very grand and austere in the grey morning light, quite unlike any museum I’d ever encountered. To tell you the truth, the building it most reminded me of was Wells Cathedral, and this impression was not diminished when I went inside. There was something similarly solemn and reverent in the atmosphere of the broad halls and corridors – especially when I was first admitted, when the museum was still and silent and empty.
Dr Weir had arranged for me to be admitted half an hour before the official opening time so that I could meet the museum’s Director of Science and see the gallery where my meteorite was to be exhibited. As promised, she was waiting for me at nine twenty at the bottom of the wide stone steps that led up to the main entrance on Cromwell Road. I hadn’t seen her for five years, but I recognized her at once. She still dressed like her mind was on Higher Things. Today, she was wearing a knee-length tweed overcoat, smart black trousers and hiking boots. I was wearing jeans, fairly traded trainers and my latest cagoule.
Dr Weir smiled solemnly and extended her hand as I approached. I felt the weight of the meteorite shift in my backpack as I took her hand.
‘Hello, Alex,’ she said. ‘How nice to see you again.’
‘Hello, Dr Weir,’ I said.
‘You’ve grown!’
‘Yes,’ I acknowledged.
‘I’m sorry – that’s a moronic thing to say, I know.’
‘That’s okay. I suppose I
am
fifty per cent older than the last time you saw me. I probably look a bit different.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘Except for my scar, of course.’
‘Yes. That’s quite remarkable.’
‘The impact site.’
Dr Weir nodded thoughtfully.
‘I was told that it would probably fade with time, but of course, it hasn’t – not yet. And for some reason my hair doesn’t want to grow there any more. I end up with this fine white line.’
‘Yes, I see. Still, not all scars are bad, Alex. Some are worth hanging on to, if you understand what I mean.’
‘Yes, I think so. Or, at least, I think I’d miss it if it wasn’t there.’
‘Yes, precisely. Well, shall we go inside? The director’s very keen to meet you.’
‘I’m keen to meet the director,’ I replied.
The Director of Science turned out to be a tall, grey-haired gentleman with a tie-less suit and the voice of a 1950s BBC newsreader – the type to be found narrating in the archive footage of Yuri Gagarin’s post-orbit visit to Britain, for example. He was another doctor, of course – Dr Marcus Lean. I’d made a point of researching him online a couple of days earlier. He’d once been an eminent biologist in Cambridge, where he’d spent many years studying extremophiles, which are tiny organisms that live and thrive in extremely hostile environments – around the vents of underwater volcanoes, or in concentrated acid solutions, or under ten metres of ice at the South Pole and so on. His research had proven of great interest to astrobiologists, who believed that if extraterrestrial life were to be discovered in the solar system, it would most likely be of a similar form – microbes that could eke out an existence in the sunless seas of Europa or the frigid methane lakes of Titan.
Given Dr Lean’s eminence as a scientist, I was keen to make a good first impression, but, sadly, this was not to be. The moment I met him my attention was diverted by the diplodocus skeleton visible over his left shoulder, which was as big as a bus and mounted on a huge rectangular plinth. While my jaw didn’t quite hit the floor, my mouth was certainly agape, and with my attention elsewhere, my handshake was rather limp and lifeless, and unaccompanied by any serious attempt at eye contact. It’s a shame, as usually my handshake is one of my particular strengths. Luckily, though, Dr Lean was forgiving of my faux pas. He said that he’d be very happy to show me around the main exhibits once we’d been up to the Vault, which was the name of the gallery where all the meteorites and other precious stones were on display.
‘If you’d like to follow me,’ Dr Lean said, ‘it’s on the mezzanine. Up the main staircase and right at Darwin.’
Darwin, of course, was Charles Darwin. He was sitting at the central summit of the grand staircase in the form of a two-ton marble statue, from where he appeared to be watching over the entrance hall with his grave, clever eyes. He looked the way he usually looks, like a doctor about to deliver some bad news, awkwardly posed in his rumpled Victorian suit, and with no great fondness for the limelight. To tell you the truth, he looked like he’d rather be digging up earthworms in his back garden – though I supposed it would be harder to sculpt a statue like that.
The Vault, at the far end of the minerals gallery, was a mesmerizing space – all stone columns and arches and low oak cabinets filled with glaring jewels: gold and sapphires and emeralds, and a diamond as large as a golf ball. Set among this company, the meteorites were, at first, easily overlooked. They were all kinds of irregular shapes and sizes, and varied in colour from coal-black to mottled caramel. Perhaps the most innocuous of all was the Nakhla Meteorite, which looked like a misshapen lump of scorched clay. Dr Lean told me that this was actually a piece of Mars. The original meteoroid had probably been blown into space by a large impact on the Red Planet’s surface. It had fallen to Earth in 1911, burning high in the skies above Egypt, from where the surviving fragments had later been recovered. Most of the other meteorites, those that hadn’t been observed as Falls, had been found in places like Antarctica and the Australian outback – uniform landscapes, untouched by human development, where they stood out as geological aberrations, even to the untrained eye. Of course, since the Earth had been the victim of about four and a half billion years of steady bombardment, there were actually meteorites scattered across every corner of the globe – it was just that in most environments they lay unnoticed.
‘It’s not every day they come crashing through one’s ceiling,’ Dr Lean concluded.
My meteorite was to be displayed in a cubic half-metre of space that had been cleared at the far right of one of the wall-mounted cabinets. The museum research team, Dr Lean explained, had also selected a newspaper article to include as part of the exhibit, which was necessary to inform or remind the general public of the meteorite’s ‘historical significance’. The article, which I also had in my scrapbook, was from the front page of
The
Times
and showed a rather dramatic helicopter shot of the hole that had been punched in our bathroom roof. The headline read: ‘
SOMERSET SCHOOL BOY HIT BY METEOR.
’
‘It was the least sensationalized article we could find,’ Dr Lean told me.
By this point, I didn’t think I could delay any longer. I took my iron–nickel meteorite from my backpack, where it was safely swaddled in two layers of bubble-wrap, and handed the package across for Dr Lean to unwrap.
‘My word,’ he said. He immediately looked about twenty years younger, I thought, as he stood running his eyes over that scorched and pitted surface. I followed his gaze across all those familiar rises and fissures and valleys, across the microfractures running through the partially exposed cross-section. And I should tell you that I didn’t feel a sense of loss as those seconds unfolded. Having seen the Vault, with its priceless collection of gems and minerals, I knew that this would be a better home for my meteorite than the top of my bookcase, which was where it had resided for the last five years. What I felt in place of loss was the strangest sense of time folding back on itself, a feeling of significance, almost akin to déjà vu. It’s hard to explain, but I think what really struck me in that stretched-out moment was the impression of what might have been, had the meteorite never come to me. A kind of shadowy parallel universe.
Without the meteorite, I would have been an entirely different person. I’d have a different brain – different connections, different function. And I wouldn’t be telling you this story now. I wouldn’t have a story to tell.
My mother would say that everything happens for a reason, but I don’t agree with that – not in the sense she’d mean it, anyway. Most of what happens is pure chance. Nevertheless, I have to admit that there are certain moments that, in retrospect, seem to shape the course of our lives to a remarkable degree. There are pinpoint events that change everything; and it is a strange curiosity, if nothing else, that the day I’m describing now, the five-year anniversary of the meteor strike, was destined to spawn another.
At lunchtime, Dr Lean led us to the museum’s delicatessen near the Exhibition Road entrance and advised the woman working the till that she should allow Dr Weir and me to order whatever we wanted from the menu free of charge. Then he shook my hand again and told me that it had been a pleasure and that he’d be sure to save me a spot on the guest list for all the museum’s forthcoming exhibitions and special events. I only had to email him to let him know I was coming and he’d make all the necessary arrangements.
‘Thank you, Dr Lean,’ I said. And this time, when I shook his hand, I made sure that my grip was solid. Perhaps a little too solid – but I thought it better to err on the side of caution. I wanted to make sure he knew that the morning’s handshake had been an anomaly.
For lunch, I had a spinach and ricotta tartlet with a mixed leaf salad and three Diet Cokes. Dr Weir had a steak sandwich and a glass of red wine, and then a coffee to follow, which she sipped slowly while I told her my thoughts on the museum so far.
‘I think, in a way I prefer the smaller exhibits,’ I said. ‘The meteorites, of course, but also the other minerals and the small insects. I mean, the dinosaurs are extremely impressive, but they’re very busy too. There’s too much to take in, and too many distractions. The less spectacular exhibits are a bit more . . .’ Dr Weir waited patiently while I struggled for the word. I wanted to say ‘intimate’ but I wasn’t sure this was the correct context. I thought it would be a minor disaster if I misused the word, so in the end I plumped for a lengthier explanation. ‘I suppose what I mean is that the smaller exhibits give you more space to think. You can kind of lose yourself in them. You can hear the sounds that your footsteps make in the corridors and imagine exactly how the museum must have been a hundred years ago.’
Dr Weir nodded. ‘I like the butterflies for similar reasons.’
A small silence passed.
‘How are you getting on at school now?’ Dr Weir asked.
‘Better,’ I said. ‘Although I don’t think I’m ever going to fit in very well. But I’ve kind of accepted that now. I like the school part, anyway – you know: the lessons themselves.’
Dr Weir nodded and sipped her coffee again.
‘I think if I could just spend the whole six hours of the school day solving algebra problems, then I’d be extremely happy. But, of course, that’s not exactly normal. That’s the part everybody else hates. Most of the other boys can’t wait for the break so they can go outside and play football. And to me, that really
is
baffling. It seems like such a waste of time and energy. It doesn’t tell you anything about the world. It doesn’t add or change anything. I don’t get the appeal.’