Downstairs, Chantel’s totting up all the ways in which Julie looks like her mum.
‘It’s, like, different colour hair, but the same kind of hair.’
‘So not the same at all,’ David says, yawning.
‘Same eyes,’ Chantel says. ‘Well, the shape.’
‘So still not the same, then,’ David says.
‘You do look like her,’ Charlotte says to Julie. ‘You can tell you’re mother and daughter.’
The cottage looks a bit like Julie’s house in Essex used to look before her mother moved out, but more so. Julie recognises the Indian rug on the sitting-room floor – it is their old rug from the house in Bristol years ago. She never saw it in Windy Close; her dad never liked that sort of thing. The two bookcases in this room are more familiar, though. Her mum took those from Windy Close when she left, and most of the books in the house – her text books from her days at the Poly, and books with titles that Julie remembers from being a child: Woman on the Edge of Time, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, Fat is a Feminist Issue, Women Who Love Too Much; and novels by Ursula Le Guin, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. Julie remembers lying on the sitting-room floor, colouring, watching TV or eating jam sandwiches, and gazing up at the bookshelves that she thought would always be there. She must have read the titles hundreds of times but she never opened any of the books. Then they were gone.
Helen comes in, asks if anyone wants another drink before bed, then goes into the kitchen to make them. She looks tired, but as if she’s still trying to get to grips with what’s going on here, and who all these people in her house actually are.
‘So . . .’ she says, when she comes back. ‘You’re all Julie’s friends?’
‘David and I used to work together,’ Julie explains, ‘and Chantel just moved into number 14 on our street. She’s Leanne’s cousin – you must remember Leanne. And Charlotte used to live there before. She moved in with Mark and his family a few years after you left.’
‘Oh, yes. How is Leanne, and how’s Mark?’
‘Um . . . Leanne’s gone to become a witch and Mark’s . . .’
‘Dead,’ finishes Charlotte. ‘He died.’
Helen looks shocked. ‘He died?’ she repeats. ‘That’s awful. How . . . ?’
‘A brain haemorrhage,’ Julie says, glancing at Charlotte.
‘And you were his girlfriend?’ Helen asks Charlotte.
Charlotte nods. ‘Yes.’
‘How do you feel about that? About him dying?’
‘Feel? Oh. I don’t know. At the time I was a mess, but you know . . .’
Helen speaks in a slow, gentle voice. ‘Time makes it better?’
‘Yes. I don’t know. A bit. It’s more the coming to terms with loss, and the guilt and all the questions you ask yourself about whether you did the right thing, or thought the right thoughts or behaved the right way.’
Helen’s nodding. ‘Hmm, hmm,’ she says. ‘Absolutely.’
Julie feels uncomfortable. Although she hasn’t seen or spoken to her mother for more than seven years, in essence she doesn’t seem to have changed very much. Her idea of getting to know someone has always been to zero in on the most life-changing, horrible thing that’s ever happened to them and make them talk about it in excruciating detail, and quiz them on exactly how it makes them feel. Charlotte doesn’t seem to mind, particularly. Then Julie realises maybe that’s because Charlotte does the same thing. In fact, now Julie thinks about it, Charlotte’s probably got more in common with Helen than Julie has.
David yawns, which makes Julie yawn. The light in the sitting room seems brighter, even though it’s almost totally blocked out by the bin-bags and the curtains. The clock on the wall says it’s almost eight in the morning. Helen makes some more Hmm, hmm noises in Charlotte’s direction before she gets up, stretches and suggests that everyone might like to go to bed.
‘You can sort yourselves out however you’d like,’ she says, providing them with a stack of blankets, pillows and sleeping bags. ‘One or two of you might want to go in Luke’s room with him – you’ll need sleeping bags if you do. Now. That –’ she points to one of the sofas – ‘is a futon. I’ve never actually pulled it out before but I’m sure it’s very simple. That other sofa’s big enough for whoever’s smallest, probably Julie, or you, Charlotte, and whoever’s left over will probably have to go on the floor in here, or in Luke’s room, or wherever.’ She laughs. ‘I’ve never had five guests before.’
‘I think I’ll go upstairs, then,’ David says, when Helen’s gone.
‘I’ll come with you, then,’ says Chantel.
They gather various bits of bedding and go.
‘That leaves us, then, babe,’ says Charlotte to Julie. She gets up and seems to be assessing the bedding options. ‘Shall we pull out this futon?’ She drags off the large throw and pulls at the futon from a couple of directions. ‘How the fuck do you get this out?’
Julie examines it. It’s pretty simple. ‘There,’ she says when she’s done it.
‘It’s cold now,’ says Charlotte. ‘We may as well both sleep on here.’
‘It is big,’ Julie says. ‘OK, whatever.’
What else can she say? No I don’t want to sleep with you because I once had a crush on you? Yeah, right. Girls sleep together all the time, though, don’t they? It’s one of those girly things. It’ll seem stupid if she says she doesn’t want to.
They arrange blankets on it, and a couple of pillows.
‘Do you think I can smoke in here?’ Charlotte asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Julie says. ‘I don’t know if Mum would mind or not. Open a window or something if you can; I’m sure it’ll be fine. Use the fire as an ashtray. I’m going to smoke too, so . . . If she says anything we just won’t do it tomorrow.’
‘OK.’
‘I’m hungry. I might go and see what there is in the kitchen.’
‘OK, cool.’ Charlotte starts rolling a cigarette. ‘If you find anything good, bring some for me.’
‘Sure.’
‘You must be starving,’ Charlotte says, as Julie goes through the sitting-room door into the kitchen. ‘You never ate those sandwiches, did you?’
The kitchen is small and has two window boxes filled with herbs. The window itself has a bin-bag taped over it, so Julie opens the back door for some air and some light. Outside there’s Helen’s small garden, crowded with shrubs, autumn leaves, more herbs and a little path that doesn’t seem to go anywhere, except to a tiny shed. Just outside the door, in a covered alcove, is a bucket, a trowel and some gardening gloves. It’s raining. Julie’s had enough of rain. She shuts the door.
She wants chocolate but there’s none in the kitchen. The small fridge contains hoummus, bean sprouts, organic cow’s milk, sheep’s cheese, carrot juice, organic vegetable cocktail and a small loaf of brown bread. There’s also some Safeway organic eggs, some Safeway yoghurts, a Safeway cucumber, several jars of Safeway olives and two bottles of white wine. Nothing edible there, although Julie remembers liking hoummus as a child, and carrot juice. The cupboards contain things like herbal teas, vitamin supplements, Echinacea, honey, lentils, uncooked beans in packets (one of Julie’s greatest fears – everyone knows that if you don’t cook beans exactly right they’ll kill you), rice, tinned soup and various bags of organic oats. There are no crisps or sweets anywhere. Desperate, and feeling slightly faint, Julie cuts a piece of dense brown bread from the fridge and spreads honey on it.
She sticks her head through the door to the sitting room. ‘Do you want bread and honey?’ she asks Charlotte.
‘No, I’m all right, thanks. I’ll have a cup of tea if you’re making one, though.’
‘Normal tea?’
‘No, chamomile, please. That’s what your mum was making for me.’
‘OK.’
Julie puts the kettle on and replaces the lid on the honey. As she’s putting it back in the cupboard she strains somehow and the next thing she knows, she’s got the hiccups. She holds her breath. When was the last time she had the hiccups? Maybe when she was a kid. Holding her breath doesn’t work, and the next hiccup catapults from inside her with startling force. Having hiccups is to do with your diaphragm going into spasm, isn’t it? That’s actually pretty scary. Whatever is spasming inside her is bigger than her heart . . . Would a heart attack feel like this, only smaller? Oh, God. There’s a glass on the draining board. Julie fills it with water, leans over the sink and tries to do that thing where you drink the water backwards. It doesn’t work. And now she’s drunk tap water. God.
Julie tips the rest of the water down the sink and closes her eyes. She tries pulling her tongue, but that doesn’t work either. She’s got to get rid of this before she becomes like that guy in Iowa who hiccupped for more than sixty years. If you can make yourself concentrate on something else, really hard, that can cure hiccups – that’s a theory, isn’t it? Maths. Maths can solve anything. 2 times 2 is 4; 4 times 3 is 12; 12 times 4 is 48; 48 times 5 is 240; 240 times 6 is 1,440; 1,440 times 7 is 10,080.
The kettle boils. Julie’s hiccups have gone.
‘Here,’ she says to Charlotte a few minutes later. ‘Tea.’
‘Cheers, babe. You OK?’
‘Yeah.’ Julie smiles. ‘I had hiccups. Freaked me out. I’m all right now.’
‘Cool.’
Charlotte’s sitting cross-legged on the big futon. Julie sits on it too.
‘Does your mum live here on her own?’ Charlotte asks.
‘Looks like it,’ Julie says.
‘You don’t know much about her, do you?’
‘Not since she moved, no.’
‘She left when you were in sixth form, didn’t she?’
‘How do you know that?’
‘You told me ages ago.’
Charlotte’s always been so into herself Julie wouldn’t expect her to remember a conversation she had with her yesterday, and certainly not one they had something like three years ago. Charlotte’s blowing on her tea and looking at Julie while she does it.
‘She seems OK,’ Charlotte says. ‘Nice. I like her house.’
‘Yeah, it’s very her.’
‘Why did she leave?’
‘My dad was having an affair.’
‘Oh. Why didn’t you go with her?’
‘She didn’t ask me.’
‘Would you have gone?’
‘I couldn’t, could I?’
‘Why not?’
‘Luke, of course. And my exams.’
‘Oh, yeah. Of course.’ Charlotte sounds unconvinced.
‘Anyway, she didn’t ask me.’
‘Is that why you’re all thingy with her?’
‘All thingy?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Am I?’
‘Yeah. Totally. She looked like she was scared of you.’
‘No, she didn’t. Don’t be stupid.’ Julie doesn’t like this conversation. She sips her tea. ‘I hate hiccups,’ she says. ‘I had to do this weird thing with numbers to cure it. It worked. You have to start at two and multiply the next whole number by the answer to the last multiplication . . .’
Charlotte looks blank. ‘Numbers,’ she says. ‘What is it with you and numbers?’
‘I just . . . I just like them. I know it’s weird.’
‘It’s not. It’s interesting. It’s just . . . You freaked me out in Homebase, though.’
‘What, when I added up the shopping?’
‘Yeah. To the last fucking penny.’
‘Addition isn’t exactly complicated,’ Julie says. ‘I told you that. It’s just a party trick. No big deal. It’s not exactly like working with imaginary numbers or anything . . .’
‘What is an imaginary number exactly?’
‘It’s pretty complicated.’
‘So? Explain it to me.’
Julie sighs. ‘It’s . . . Oh, how can I explain? Um . . . you sure you want to know?’
Charlotte sips her tea. ‘Yeah. I like the idea of imaginary numbers.’
‘OK. It’s like . . . All right . . . What’s the square root of 4?’
‘Huh? The square root of 4.’
‘Yeah, what number do you have to multiply by itself to get 4?’
‘Oh. 2. Yeah, that’s right; 2 squared is 4.’
‘OK, so what’s the square root of 36?’
‘Um . . . 6. Yeah, 6 times 6 is 36.’
‘Yeah. Good. So what’s the square root of 1?’
Charlotte thinks for a second. ‘Is it 1?’
‘Excellent. 1 times 1 is 1. So what’s the square root of minus 1?’
‘Huh?’
‘Minus 1? What’s the square root?’
‘Um . . . minus 1?’
‘No. Minus 1 times minus 1 is 1.’
‘Is it?’ Charlotte frowns. ‘No, it can’t be.’
‘A minus number multiplied by a minus number is always a positive number. Don’t you remember that from school?’
‘No. Well, maybe vaguely. This is where maths loses me. That sort of thing just doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t seem logical.’
‘It is, though,’ Julie says. ‘A negative value multiplied with a negative value must be positive. The negative values cancel each other out. It’s like with English, if you said, “I didn’t do nothing”, you’re actually saying you did do something. The two negatives cancel each other out.’
‘I get how that works in English, but I don’t get it with maths. It’s too theoretical. It fucks with your head. It makes you feel stoned all the time.’ She laughs. ‘Well, maybe that’s a good thing, but still . . .’
‘It’s not theoretical, though,’ Julie says. ‘It’s what actually happens. Um . . . I’m trying to think of a good example . . . OK, say you smoked a pack of 20 fags every day. We’ll call that a value of minus 20, in the sense that you’re taking 20 cigarettes away each time you smoke them. You see what I mean? You had them. They’re gone. Minus 20. OK? But say you gave up smoking for 5 days, and you therefore didn’t smoke your normal packet a day for those 5 days. So if we multiply the minus 20 cigarettes by the minus 5 times you have smoked them, you get 100 cigarettes. Do you see what I mean? You haven’t smoked 20 fags a day for 5 days, so you’re left with 100 unsmoked fags. Do you see that? So minus 20 times minus 5 equals 100.’
Charlotte looks confused. ‘I sort of get it.’
‘It’s like when they say you’ll save money by giving up smoking. By not spending it you’re saving it. It’s the same thing. “Not” is a negative. So is “spending”. Not spending means you have the money you haven’t spent. So you’ve saved money. A negative multiplied by a negative is always a positive.’
Charlotte’s rolling another cigarette. ‘OK,’ she says, frowning. ‘Yeah, I get that.’
‘So minus 1 times minus 1 is actually 1. If you usually drank one bottle of vodka a day and you did that for minus 1 days – in other words, if you didn’t do it for a day – you’d have 1 bottle of vodka as a result. So if 1 times 1 is 1, and if minus 1 times minus 1 is also 1, then we can say that 1 has 2 square roots: 1 and minus 1. Similarly, the square root of 36 is 6, and also minus 6.’
‘What’s this got to do with imaginary numbers?’
‘Well, we’re still looking for the square root of minus 1, remember. So if it’s not in fact minus 1, because minus 1 squared is actually 1, then what is it?’
Charlotte lights her cigarette. ‘Pass,’ she says. ‘I don’t know. If it’s not minus 1 – and I get that, now – then what else could it be?’
‘Exactly. There isn’t anything else that it could be, so it doesn’t exist.’
‘This is pretty interesting, actually,’ Charlotte says, sipping more tea. ‘Right. So if it doesn’t exist, then . . .’
‘Basically, mathematicians invented imaginary numbers to function as the square roots of minus numbers. So that’s what they are. You write them as values of “i”, which is the square root of minus 1. The square root of minus 4 is therefore 2i.’
‘So what’s the square root of i, then?’ Charlotte asks, after thinking about this for a few seconds.
‘You so don’t want to go there,’ Julie says, laughing. ‘Can I have a roll-up?’
‘Yeah, sure. So how do you know all this stuff?’
Julie shrugs. ‘School, reading, the Internet.’
‘You never went to university, did you?’ Charlotte says.
‘Nope.’
‘Why not?’
‘I failed my A levels. Didn’t I ever tell you that?’
‘No.’ Charlotte wrinkles her forehead. ‘So what did you do, fail them on purpose so you wouldn’t have to leave Luke and your safe life, and to punish your mum for leaving you or something?’ She laughs. ‘That would be so you, babe.’
Julie can feel her face going red. This is typical of Charlotte. Things that everyone else somehow misses are always completely obvious to her.
‘Why are you saying that?’ Julie says.
‘Well . . . you’re too clever to have failed. But you are fucked up enough to fail on purpose and probably get some kind of cheap anarchic thrill out of it. I know you.’
‘Yeah. You do.’
‘So you did, then?’ Charlotte says, her eyes wide. ‘You did fail on purpose?’
Julie looks down. ‘It doesn’t matter what I did, does it? This is my life.’
‘Does anyone else know?’
‘No.’
‘Wow. So did she notice?’
‘Who?’
‘Your mum. Did she notice you’d failed and make a big fuss about it?’
‘Not really. She didn’t do anything.’
Charlotte shakes her head. ‘You poor thing,’ she says.
It’s cold. Julie gets under the covers. When Charlotte puts her cigarette out she does the same. They lie there in silence for a few minutes, not touching.
‘Did you miss not going to university?’ Charlotte says eventually.
‘I don’t know, do I? Since I’ve never been, I don’t know what I missed.’ Julie suddenly laughs. ‘Oh, God, I sound like Luke now.’
Charlotte laughs too. ‘Seriously, though, did you want to go?’
‘I don’t know really. At the time, I suppose I did.’
‘And now?’
‘Now? No, I don’t think so.’
‘Why not?’
‘Aren’t you tired?’ Julie asks, ignoring Charlotte’s question.
‘A bit. I’m still a bit psyched from the journey and everything. So why not?’
Julie sighs. ‘I just like being a waitress and reading about other stuff in my spare time. I wouldn’t want to do a maths job or a chemistry job. Did you know I was good at chemistry as well? I liked the equations. But anyway, I’m scared of chemicals, so I definitely wouldn’t want to do a chemistry job. I liked physics, too, although I’m hardly going to become an engineer or anything. And maths? I don’t want to be in business or do economics or accountancy. I’d like to solve a theorem, or a problem that’s never been solved before. I suppose that’s my dream, even if it is a bit of a stupid one.’
‘Like thingy – that French one?’
‘Fermat’s Last Theorem? Yeah, that’s been solved now. There’s a maths institute offering million-dollar prizes for solving certain other unsolved problems, though. There’s one problem in particular – I think about it when I’m waitressing. That’s basically it. I’m a waitress trying to solve maths theorems and I’m happy with that. No one knows about the maths, by the way, so you’ve got two secrets out of me tonight.’
‘You like having a secret life, don’t you?’
Julie hasn’t ever considered the idea of a secret life in relation to herself before but she does have one. She suddenly thinks about Chantel’s grandmother.
‘I suppose so,’ Julie says. ‘Although it sounds a bit weird when you say it like that.’ She frowns. ‘I suppose it’s the only thing that’s completely mine. Plus, Luke’s my only real friend apart from you – and I haven’t seen you for ages – and he’s not interested in maths or numbers or physics, so it’s not like it’s a total secret, because I haven’t actually got anyone to tell who’d be interested, or understand what I was going on about. But . . . Yeah, I do quite like it that way. I like having my own thing.’
‘So why are you so sad,’ Charlotte says, ‘if you’re so happy?’
‘Other stuff. Luke. My dad. My mum. Just stuff, you know.’
‘Do you think you’ll be able to solve this problem or theorem – or whatever it’s called?’
Julie laughs. ‘Yeah, right. Me and the other zillion people working on it.’
‘Do mathematicians use words like “zillion”?’
Julie laughs again. ‘Look, there’s a very, very small chance I could apply for a maths scholarship without needing A levels – please don’t tell anyone about this – and when Luke’s better I might think about it.’
‘That would be really cool.’
‘I also know four computer-programming languages. I learnt them for fun last year. So I don’t have to be a waitress. I just enjoy it. So I might do maths, or I might continue being a waitress. Who knows? I might decide to sell flowers by the side of the road. Well – it would have to be a B-road, but still.’
‘Wow, babe.’ Charlotte laughs. ‘You’re a total free spirit.’
‘I have to be, don’t I? I haven’t had any other choice. Also, I’ve been taught by the best.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well.’ Julie moves slightly in the bed. Her breathing feels different. ‘You.’
‘Me?’
‘I was really depressed before you came to Windy Close. I learnt how to be a free spirit – if that’s what it is – by copying you. You were the one who taught me that it doesn’t matter what your job is, or how much money you’ve got, or how many people you employ or have power over, or even how often you wash your hair or what clothes you wear – what matters are the books you read, and the thoughts you have, and being true to yourself, whoever you are. I’ve never bought into that corporate bullshit of going to university so you can get a good job and move to London and spend all your money on rent and lunch and tights just so you can feel important. I like being down to earth. I’ve always been like that but meeting you made me realise I’m not a freak, and that it’s OK.’
‘I taught you that? Fucking hell.’
‘Well . . .’
Charlotte laughs. ‘When you put it like that my life doesn’t sound like such a fuck-up.’
‘Your life isn’t a fuck-up.’
‘It so is.’
‘How?’
‘Where do I start? Me and Mark ditched university to go travelling, so I haven’t even got a degree. We did too many drugs. He died – and I bet you all the drugs I made him take didn’t exactly help him to not have a brain haemorrhage. I drowned in guilt. My parents disowned me. I did more drugs. I have no future. My life totally sucks . . . I could go on.’
‘Come on, Charlotte. If I’m a free spirit, you definitely are.’
‘Maybe we should be free spirits together, then,’ she says, really quietly. ‘It would be a whole lot more fun.’
‘But you’re going to India.’
‘And you’re going to do some kind of weird maths thing.’
‘Only if I can get there on B-roads. They probably won’t even accept me.’
Charlotte laughs, then turns over. She falls asleep breathing into Julie’s hair.
Julie dreams about driving fast through water.