White Light (3 page)

Friday, 3 April 2015. 05:52

Just before dawn I surfaced enough from a heavy, alcohol-fuelled sleep to dream. In the dream, which seemed no different to being awake, Sarah came into my exile bedroom, smiling, relaxed, vibrating with life. Her hair was down and was tousled round her head as if she'd just woken up. She was humming 'Summertime', which she always said made her
feel horny.

'Hello, sweetheart,' she said, 'fish are jumping...' I laid impassively in the narrow bed, watching as she slipped off her negligee and crawled in on top of me. '...and the weather is fine...' Her breath was hot on my body as she slowly worked her way down, looking up under her hair at me for a second with a sexy smile and I realised with a horrible start that this wasn't Sarah, this was somebody else...

I woke with a jump and almost fell out of bed, my arm thrashing at my dream, and with a massive hard on. I slumped back, finding the pillow wet with sweat, and put my hand over my eyes.

After all that it took me a long time to get going in the morning. I couldn't shake the feeling from the dream, that Sarah wasn't Sarah, that she was alive somewhere, that she'd been in the room with me. I showered and dressed, and made it downstairs, drawing the kitchen curtains to reveal a grey sky which leaned down on me from outside the window.  I put the kettle on and automatically reached down two coffee mugs from the shelf.  Seeing what I had done, I turned and left the room.

I started vaguely getting ready for work, but was interrupted by the crunching footsteps of the postman as he advanced up the drive.  I picked up the scatter of letters and circulars and with a sinking feeling saw that  several were addressed to Sarah.  I supposed I ought to reply to the catalogues and charities and whoever to say could they please remove her from their mailing lists.  I had kept putting off that delightful chore, and discovered that today my motivation was no higher for ringing impersonal, professionally-cheerful customer service representatives to inform them that my wife would no longer be ordering from their company because she was, in fact, dead.

Eventually I got into the car, and headed towards town. The Ford was so old that it still had a tape player in the dashboard, so I'd brought the mix tape with me and now slotted it in. I relived those first few anxious seconds where the tape might get chewed, but they passed, and then the sounds of
Flat Beat
by Mr Oizo filled the interior. What had I been thinking? It was amazing Sarah had gone out with me after this. Shaking my head, I pressed FFWD and then tried again. This time it was Blondie's
Heart of Glass
.

Debbie Harry serenaded me all the way into town. Oxford is lovely in the Spring, and I was half aware of the new green leaves on the plane trees in South Parks Road as I drove back to the lab. The sun had burnt off the light rain of earlier and tourists were wandering along the still-damp pavements with their typical aimless gait, and the animal rights protestors were starting to bake in the brightening sunshine as they mounted their continual protest outside the Biology building.

Once I had a love and it was divine

Soon found out I was losing my mind

You got that right, I thought, as I turned into the Cockcroft car park. There were no cars, and the bike racks were quite empty – it was out of Term, and it looked as if many of my colleagues were more interested in punting than physics today. One step onto the lab corridor, however, and Dave shuffled out of his office to see who was coming. Dave never seemed to go home, and I wasn’t surprised to find him here even when everyone else had skived off.

‘Alright, Dave? How’s it going?’ I tried to remember what I normally behaved like. Do I usually smile? ‘Did you get the time on the mass spectrometer?’ I managed to ask.

Dave smiled and mooched beside me down the corridor towards my lab and the gents, apparently not noticing I was massively faking it. ‘Yeah, all set up for next week. I’m just working out the protocols now.’ He grinned and paused half through the toilet door, ‘By the way, arsehole alert: Gilbert is on the prowl again for some juicy news before he’s off on his Easter holidays, so if I were you I’d  start falsifying
results quick’.

I snorted and he bashed through the doorway and out of sight. Still, he had a point: Gilbert had sent back a very impatient reply to my email of late yesterday, explaining I was systematically examining element 122 for all manner of electromagnetic peculiarities. But whether he thought it was a time waster or not, it needed to be done and had thrown up a couple of very odd results that I had been keeping to myself while I re-ran and re-checked everything. I let myself into my lab and prudently locked the door behind me to stymie my boss from just breezing in. Beautiful day or not, Bill Gilbert was known to dislike his wife and children and preferred to come to work rather than be at home with them. Prior to his obligatory Spring holiday in Florida he would be hanging around the building somewhere, just waiting to take his bad mood out on somebody. Well, this morning I was determined that it wouldn't be me. I threw myself down on my creaky chair, fed the hamster, put the kettle on and fired up the PC.

What had been puzzling me was the reaction of element 122 to strong electromagnetic fields – even the new tests with the borrowed equipment showed that strange blank in the measurements. Interestingly, the duration of the blank was directly proportional to the frequency of the magnetic field acting on the element. The whole point of re-running the tests had been to rule out experimental error, but looking at the results on the screen now, the same mystery blip was front and centre.

I sat down at the keyboard and typed out a quick email to Levi, my contact at Harvard.

Levi

Thanks for giving me a couple of weeks' grace with the 122. I've just started the analysis and am getting strange effects at low mag fields. Are you seeing the same with your sample? Duration of recording error seems prop to field used.

Under pressure here to write up internal report so would be happy to pool results with you.

Adam

Maybe Levi would yield some data that I could cite in my paper for Gilbert, seeing he wasn't interested in my own results. Despite it being 2am in Boston I got an immediate reply:

Adam

All very sorry to hear your news. Are you ok? Come to Boston and we will get drunk together.

Fucking 122 is batshit. Keep reading data missing at low mag fields. Have checked all equipment and is fine. Is this what you are getting too?

Attached see our data. Hope you are making sense of this.

Levi

I smiled at Levi's characteristic email. Did he ever leave his lab? Maybe I should go to Boston, just chuck everything here and start again. We'd always talked about moving abroad but it had never... I swallowed and pushed the thought away, scanning quickly through Levi's attached data instead. Like he'd said, the readings all skipped at low field strengths. I pulled up my own two sets of results and overlaid them: identical. Whatever the hell was happening with this bloody mineral was happening in a predictable and measurable way, if that was any consolation. It wasn't. I typed a short reply.

Thanks Levi

All looks the same here, very weird. Let's definitely meet up and get pissed. Any chance of moving my research to your lab? Wanting to get out of Oxford.

Cheers, A

I sat back and looked out of the window. South Parks Road looked soft and warm in the sunshine, but despite this the idea of leaving Oxford for good and starting again was feeling very right. I wondered if Fergus would like America. My computer pinged.

Adam

I hate 122!!! See you in Connelly's Bar ASAP. Will speak to Erica about transfer, would be great to have you working
with us.

Laters

I worked all day in my lab, re-checking and verifying results, and roughly putting together a very basic report for my irritating boss. I was hoping that giving him something would get him off my back for a while, although I admitted that was probably unlikely. I'd just emailed him my report and the combined sets of results from me and Boston when my phone rang. The caller display said Kate, Sarah's boss from the homelessness charity.

'Hello, Adam? How are you?'

'Hey, Kate, I'm ok.'

'Listen,' she sounded awkward, 'are you in Oxford? Could we maybe meet for a quick drink? I'm at the Kings Arms.'

The Kings Arms was about a five minute walk from my lab. I couldn't think why she'd want to meet in person, but sod it, I didn't have anything else to do, did I?

'Yeah, see you there in a bit.'

Early evening was dropping softly over the city as I left the lab and walked down to the pub. It's usually a magnet for students and tourists, sitting as it does just opposite the Bodleian library at the top of Broad Street, but this Friday night was out of term and too soon for the tourist season, so it was pleasantly quiet.

I got a pint at the bar and found Kate easily, a small, middle aged woman in non-descript skirt and cardigan, sitting on the padded bench-seat in the Wadham Room – a book-lined space overlooking the golden wall of the new Weston Library.

'Hi!' she got up and we awkwardly embraced for a second. I knew that Sarah had been fond of her, and she'd come round to dinner a couple of times, but I didn't know her well. She always seemed the typical Oxford blue-stocking to me: earnest and slightly posh. Tonight, though, she seemed nervous, her glass of house red already half empty. I took a long sip of my beer.

'How are you, Adam?' she asked, then shook her head, angrily. 'Sorry, stupid bloody question.'

'Don't worry about it,' I smiled, trying to set her at her ease. 'I'm ok. Everything is... ok. How are things at Homes For All?'

She shrugged, 'Same as. No funding, no interest from the council.' Another pull on her wine, which nearly finished it. 'But hey ho, we knew what we were getting into, trying to get affordable housing for care-leavers in one of the most expensive places in the country!' She smiled wryly, twirling her wine glass back and forth in her fingers.

'Refill?'

'Why not, anything red. Thanks.'

While I was waiting at the bar I tried to figure out why Kate was so jumpy. Was it just natural awkwardness at meeting the Grieving Widower? I couldn't tell. I was starting to feel the night's familiar crushing pointlessness creeping up on me. I didn't get myself another pint; I just wanted to get this over with and go home.

I placed the glass of red wine onto the table in front of Kate, and slipped back into my seat. Beside my almost full pint now sat a brightly patterned paper carrier bag, the sort of thing people give birthday presents in when they can't be arsed to wrap them up.

'What's this?'

'Sorry about the bag, it's all I could find.' Kate took another glug of wine. 'It's all Sarah's things, you know, from the office. I was hanging onto them until... Anyway, we've got a new volunteer starting next week and so I had to...'

I felt the black cloud above my head deepen. 'Ok, not a problem,' I heard myself saying, 'thanks for bringing them.' Quickly, as if the bag was radioactive, I swung it off the table and onto the bench next to me, out of my eye line.

Kate's mood did not seem to improve now the unpleasant task of handing over Sarah's note books and pens was finished. She swirled her glass, sloshing red wine up the side and splashing it on the table.

'What's up?' I just wanted this to be over now. The lights from the huge art deco chandelier which hung, incongruously, in the room seemed horribly bright and the beer tasted sour in my mouth. I wondered vaguely whether I was getting a migraine, or whether I was just fucking pissed off to the point of bodily shut down.

Kate grimaced and sat up, looking me in the eye. She took a breath and visibly steeled herself. 'She phoned me, you know, the night – of the accident.' I hadn't known this. 'You were abroad, I know, and I think she just wanted somebody to talk to.'

Her eyes slid down to the table, and she began dabbing her finger in the small puddle of red wine that had slopped out of her glass. I said nothing.

'She was horribly upset, really sobbing.' She swallowed. 'I tried to get her to come to mine and say what it was all about but she said she couldn't
tell me.'

Kate sat up and knocked back the remaining wine in her glass. 'I feel so guilty, Adam, that I didn't say I would go and meet her or something. She drove home so upset, I can't help but think...' I suddenly realised that she was crying, tears pouring unheeded down her cheeks and dripping onto the table. Without saying anything I reached over and put my hands over hers, stilling their repetitive dab dabbing. She grasped them, hard, and then almost flung them away from her.