“And you tell that sister of yours to give me a call.” Nanna’s voice sounds grumpy on the other end of the line. “I shouldn’t have to wait until teatime to talk to my granddaughters.”
It might be morning here, but for Nanna Pegg it’s teatime. That’s because she lives in Australia. She moved there when I was just a baby, so I’ve only seen her in real life a couple of times. It costs a lot of money to fly to Australia.
We went there on holiday once when I was six, but I don’t remember much about that now. Just the kangaroos and koalas I saw when Nanna Pegg took me to the zoo.
I speak to Nanna most weekends though because she’s always phoning Mum up to moan about how you can’t buy proper Marmite in the shops and how big the bugs are over there. Once she rang up in hysterics after she found a funnel-web spider hiding in her knickers when she hung them out on the line.
Dad said he felt sorry for the spider. Mum hit him then.
Mum’s always trying to get Nanna Pegg to use her computer to give us a call, but she says she doesn’t do technology.
“Are you still there, Lily?” Nanna’s voice echoes slightly as it bounces off the satellite to reach me here.
“I’m here, Nanna. And it’s me – Maisie.”
“Good girl. And how are you doing at school?”
Nanna forgets that I don’t go to school any more. She gets me and Lily mixed up too. She gets a lot of things mixed up. I think that’s why Mum wants her to come back to Britain to live with us.
“Fine,” I say. It’s quicker than reminding her that I’m studying for an Open University degree in Mathematics and Physics. She was so proud when I was the youngest person ever to pass their A levels, but I think she’s forgotten that now.
“You keep working hard and don’t forget to send me a picture from your birthday party.”
“I will, Nanna.”
“Bye, Maisie.”
“Bye, Nan.”
As I place the phone back in the stand, my arm brushes against the statue of a cat standing on the corner table. For a second, the blue-glass figurine wobbles dangerously and I have to quickly catch hold of it to stop it from falling to the floor.
I breathe a sigh of relief. That was close. Mum collects these little cat statues and this one is her favourite. She says Dad bought it for her from a flea market in Florence when they went there on their honeymoon. It’s vintage Murano glass apparently. Mum would kill me if I broke it.
Carefully placing the cat back on the table, I turn around. Through the door to the kitchen I can hear Mum clattering about, the fresh smell of baking making me feel hungry again even though I’ve only just eaten breakfast. I glance at my watch. Still over two hours to go before people start arriving for my birthday party and I get the chance to open my presents.
Albert Einstein once said that if you put your hand on a hot stove for a minute it seems like an hour, but if you sit with a pretty girl for an hour it seems like a minute. That’s relativity. And a bit sexist, I think. But waiting for my party to get started makes me feel like I’m travelling near the speed of light.
This is because Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity says that time passes slower for someone travelling near the speed of light relative to – that means compared to – someone standing still. The speed of light always stays the same – 299,792,458 metres per second – but time and space can change, depending on where you’re looking from. So if I took off in a spaceship from Earth and then zoomed around the galaxy at nearly the speed of light to kill a couple of hours before my birthday party, time would slow down for me compared to everyone back on Earth. Onboard the spaceship I wouldn’t feel like time had slowed down, I’d just think the trip was only taking me a couple of hours, but when I got back to Earth ready to get the party started, I’d discover that decades had passed. All my family would be fifty years older – Lily would be an old lady, and Mum and Dad might even have died.
Shaking my head to try and escape this scary thought, I head for the stairs. If Mum and Dad are busy getting things ready for my party and Lily’s disappeared as per usual, I’ll just hang out on my own in my room.
From the doorway my bedroom looks pretty normal: bed, desk, wardrobe and bookshelves, the colour scheme a tasteful lilac and grey. But it’s underneath my cabin bed that things get really interesting. That’s where I keep my experiments.
Pulling back the chequered bedspread that hangs over the arched entrance, I climb beneath my bed. It’s like the TARDIS under here, not exactly bigger than it looks from the outside, but definitely full of surprises. Squeezing past the innards of an old-fashioned TV that I’ve left just inside the entrance, I switch on the lamp so I can inspect my latest experiment.
I’m using this TV to build my own particle accelerator. This is a machine that can speed up and smash subatomic particles. The biggest particle accelerator in the world is called the Large Hadron Collider. It’s a twenty-seven-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets and cost four and a half billion pounds to build. Scientists are using this particle accelerator to search for the secrets of the universe, but I’m building my own using this second-hand TV that Dad bought me off eBay for 99p.
As he struggled up the stairs with the bulky TV, Dad asked me why I couldn’t have got a flat-screen instead. I told him that I needed the cathode ray tube inside the TV and you don’t get these in a flat-screen. Inside the cathode ray tube, you’ve got this wire that when it gets heated up spits out tiny subatomic particles called electrons. These electrons are then accelerated in a beam before being deflected by a series of magnetic coils until they hit the back of the TV screen. This is coated in stuff called phosphor, which glows when the electrons hit and it’s these tiny spots of glowing colour that make up the picture you see on the TV.
I turn what’s left of the TV on. As it hums into life, I closely watch the screen. Instead of Scooby-Doo I see a white spot in the centre of the screen. This is the beam of electrons.
Reaching behind me, I grab hold of my shoebox of scientific equipment. Ignoring the Geiger counter resting on the top, I rummage around the box until I find what I’m looking for.
Bringing the magnet towards the side of the tube I watch the white spot on the screen zip upwards. Then, as I pull the magnet away, the spot returns to the centre of the screen. It works. The magnet is bending the path of the electron beam.
I close my eyes, trying to visualise what’s happening. Nearly two hundred years ago a scientist called Michael Faraday showed that there are invisible spiders’ webs called fields that fill the universe. When I bring the magnet towards the TV the strands of these invisible webs mingle and cause the electrons to curve towards the edge of the screen.
I imagine these gossamer-thin lines stretching in every direction, trembling in response to the slightest disturbance in the universe. I open my eyes. Even light is just the rippling of this spider’s web as it stretches through space.
I turn off the TV with a sigh. I thought that being ten would feel different, but so far it’s just the same. Me stuck in my room thinking about science while Lily ignores me upstairs.
If space is infinite, Mrs Bradbury says this means there’s another galaxy out there that looks just like ours. This is because there’s only so many ways that atoms can be arranged to make stars, planets, people and stuff, so in an infinite universe things would just keep on getting repeated, but randomly. In an infinite universe, there’s an infinite number of Maisies out there, just like me.
I bet they’re having a more interesting birthday.
Outside my bedroom, I hear the clattering sound of Lily’s footsteps coming down the stairs. I sit tight in my Batcave, waiting to see if she’s coming to say sorry for being such a pain on my birthday. But instead of a knock on my bedroom door, I hear the bathroom door slam shut instead.
Lily never apologises.
Climbing out from under the cabin bed, I walk across and open my bedroom door. Across the landing I can see the closed bathroom door. I hover in the doorway, trying to decide what to do.
Maybe if I accidentally bump into Lily when she comes out of the bathroom, she’ll do something with me. It is my birthday, after all. We could play a videogame together or maybe just go out in the garden and giggle at Dad making a mess of putting up the gazebo or even—
From inside the bathroom I hear the sound of Lily crying.
For a second, I’m not a hundred per cent sure that’s what I’ve heard, but then I hear another long juddering sob followed by the sound of Lily’s voice, barely louder than a whisper.
“Oh God…”
Suddenly worried, I gently knock on the bathroom door.
“Lily? Are you OK?”
No answer.
Downstairs I hear the distant whirr of a food blender as Mum carries on baking up a storm, but inside the bathroom there’s just silence now.
“Lily?” I ask again, knocking a little louder as I put my ear to the door. “Do you want me to get Mum?”
That’s when the bathroom door opens and Lily stares back at me, dark circles beneath her bloodshot eyes.
I’m just about to ask her if she’s OK when she grabs hold of my T-shirt and drags me inside.