8. Unruly trail
‘… whoever calls to his mind … the great image of our mother nature … whoever sees himself in it, and not only himself but a whole kingdom, like a dot made by a very fine pencil; he alone estimates things according to their true proportions.’
Let’s talk about electrons. Wait, don’t skip this bit! Not because Dan’s dizzy little flock might take offence, but because there is magic here. Electrons, as most of us vaguely know and little care, govern chemistry and bind atoms into molecules, and so explain why everything around us — including this page, the air in your lungs and the front tyre of Dan’s motorbike — looks, feels and works the way it does. Most of us could also guess that electrons are what electricity is made of: when you switch on your kettle, electrons in the copper cable start to sway backward and forward, like weeds on the seabed. The electric current shuttles through at the speed of light, but the electrons themselves just sway gently: the current is not them flowing, but them passing on the nudge, like the clicking balls in a Newton’s cradle. Similes drawn from scales we can comprehend.
But what are electrons, really? Are they, really and truly, little shiny balls whirling around in orbits, and occasionally drifting off as though caught in a breeze? Like any other balls, but smaller? Or are they mere eddies of the breeze itself, or ripples in a flowing stream? Or are they, in the end, just equations on a page, mathematical constructs designed to embody a fundamental constant — a suspiciously arbitrary number, the elementary charge, that we are told possesses a profound and magical significance — that it is better not to try visualising at all?
Dan Mock is happy to think of his electrons as all of these things simultaneously. When he first encountered the wave-particle duality, reading ahead of the GCSE syllabus at school, the concept elbowed its way into his tidy brain and started a riot. Not waves, not particles, but both! At the same time. Wow! Everything I — we, everyone — had assumed about the world is fucked! When, soon afterwards, he read about relativity and its consequences, his mouth hung open. Even more fucked. It had been years earlier, at a parents’ evening when he was just eleven, that his science teacher had confidently predicted, ‘Natural Sciences at Cambridge’ (overconfidently, as it turned out — Dan spilled a glass of water down his trousers while waiting to be called for his interview at Peterhouse, and fluffed it). But it was then, at sixteen, learning of these mind-bending wonders, that the passion, the thrill, took root.
Since then his vision of the universe — yes, Dan carries in his mind a vision of the universe — has matured and expanded, but the thrill has remained. His vision encompasses not only observable reality, which is peculiar enough, but also the hinterland of conjecture, of interpretation, at the fringes of science. You can, for example, make the wave-particle duality go away, if it troubles you — but at the cost of accepting countless parallel universes. His job at the synchrotron combines the fantastical — electrons going so fast that time itself runs slow — and the tangible — oversized fridge magnets. Magnets are the tools of his trade. It’s magnets that accelerate the electrons to their barely conceivable, take-it-on-trust speed, magnets that steer and focus them, and magnets that hurl them around those vomit-inducing corners. Dan’s father — another gadget-lover, but one fitted with a pacemaker — isn’t allowed on the guided tour.
Dan didn’t end up at this particular synchrotron by accident. Ever since he specialised it has been his ambition to defy the critics of his arcane field — particle physics — by helping to solve real problems. In recent months he has been working with a team of pharmacologists, interrogating a protein in the DNA of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, seeking a vulnerable spot on which to focus future attacks.
Come on, he urges, as the electrons shine their blinding X-ray torch on the miscreant. Strike a blow for all the consumptive scientists who died before they could make their discoveries, and whose names we have therefore forgotten — and for the million human hosts TB works through every year in its own mindless, pointless battle for survival. It has a ferocious armoury of adaptations, but we, the human species, are the more ingenious.
Are we the more deserving? Dan briefly ponders interspecies ethics as he skips through diffraction images of blurry dots — TB’s Enigma code. Yes: the vicious little monsters have to die.
James F. Saunders thinks about his impending rendezvous with Brenda, and speculates furiously. He hasn’t had sex for seven years. After Becks commanded him, in front of all their friends, to walk out of her life (he pushed back his chair, stood up, strolled out of the restaurant forgetting his jacket and never saw Becks or the jacket again), he had a couple of drunken one-nighters. Then there was a two-month thing with Kate, the librarian with big glasses, who was a decade older and didn’t really want a loser like James. He shudders to think of it.
Cowed by the failure and embarrassment of these ill-matched unions, he became for a while a sullen slave to internet porn. He was living in a shabby house-share in York, supposedly writing his debut novel behind a locked door, but actually clicking through an endless, lonely anatomical slideshow, trying to escape or conjure memories of Becks, perhaps, or just wallowing without intention. The Cormorant, at first so imperious, so electrifying, his paean to mortality, died itself there among the computer viruses and bog roll.
This is one reason he is happy to have no internet connection in his room in Merryman’s Bay. Over the past five years the sexual impulse, which transforms an intelligent man into a slavering beast but which is, ironically, essential to his identity, has slowly faded. He has written about it, read about it, abstracted it, and finally starved and sublimated it almost out of existence. Almost: arousal revisits occasionally at odd or inconvenient times, like a bad back. He usually tries to ignore it.
Now he’s going to meet Brenda. It’s not a date. But he can’t stop thinking about those biceps under the lace — that physicality — and a knowingness, a sexual presence that moved behind the screen of her shyness. He pushes aside his chair to make a space on the floor and attempts a few press-ups. To his surprise, he can do ten. Later, in the bathroom, he examines his stooped reflection, forces his shoulders back, tries to look like a sound specimen. Should he clean-shave, or just tidy up? Should he trim the unruly trail of hair below his navel? Should he splurge eight pounds fifty on a haircut in Whitby?
Love is an emanation. Love is a mirror. Bring the notebook.
When Natalie Mock describes her accident, representing the shower cradle with two up-curled fingers of her right hand and her falling body with her left, her colleagues’ faces wrinkle with fascinated horror. The bruises and the breathing discomfort are fading and various scabs are itching and flaking over vivid new skin.
She has, of course, skimmed through the letters. The girl they’re addressed to isn’t her — no longer exists. Could it have been otherwise? Is it possible to ride so carefully through life, push so smoothly and confidently over obstacles and traumas, that your identity is preserved more or less intact at thirty, forty, eighty? Would you want to? Or does time itself enforce reinvention, repurposing, rebranding? Are she and Dan the same people who agreed to marry each other? Back then, she was going to be an architect (a nettling postscript: Dan was going to be a particle physicist, and is one).
Such silence here without you. You are my voice, my music, my rowan parting the wind. Rain falls, my heart beats without a sound until you return. Come back to me soon.
While her nearest colleagues are out for lunch, Natalie opens a browser and types her ex-boyfriend’s name. Thousands of hits. She skims down a few pages of images of smiling men, young and old: suited Californian surgeons, bloggers in arty monochrome, a police mugshot. Strange to think of all these insignificant men casually flaunting the same name — his name. She adds ‘UK’ to narrow the search. Tries his middle name, the name of his university, a couple of likely professions, remembered hobbies, the city where he lived. Nothing. She’ll need more to go on.
Or she would need more to go on, if she actually cared. Making himself untraceable is somehow characteristic of his arrogance. She remembers the gathering whispers of suspicion that he might not be the generous, dependable soulmate she wanted. His endless intellectualisation of their relationship was, she acknowledged to herself at last, his way of preparing the ground for future selfishness. She was certain, back then — had no regrets. But now a mischievous little hand of doubt tugs at her. All she wants is a glimpse of who he has become. To make sure. She hears the approaching chatter of colleagues and closes the browser.
Mike Vickers graciously admits to himself that his job sometimes makes him happy. The Box has recovered last week’s losses, and his firm’s colossal main fund is doing well enough to soothe touchy egos. He thumbs the key in his pocket and is mildly surprised to see the lights flash not on a battered Volvo estate that looks very much like the car his father passed down to him when he was eighteen (the old man had bought a Jag during a brief spell of prosperity), but on the sleek, black Audi S5 behind it. Maybe he’ll gift it to his dad when he trades up.
As he drives, he dictates to his hands-free phone. ‘Email. Compose. To. James Fuck Fakes Saunders. Subject. Execution. Dear James comma new line. Thank you for your frank reply, but I think we can do better. We both have doubts about our place in the cosmos.’ He slows, waves a group of students across the road, beneficent behind the embossed leather wheel. ‘I am succeeding at an enterprise of questionable value to mankind, while you have a calling you think noble, but have failed to execute. The problem is, your calling is only noble if you do execute — otherwise it’s merely self-indulgence of the most contemptible kind.’ A set of traffic lights turns green as he approaches, as though by arrangement. ‘Have you at least tried to diversify? Journalism, perhaps, or tutoring? I make these suggestions for your own good, and that of the welfare state. New line. Sincerely comma new line. Mike Vickers. New line. P.S. Brenda can look after herself, as you may soon discover. Send.’
That evening, while taking a satisfied stroll along the canal, hands in pockets, quite by accident but with deific precision, he steps on a snail.
James F. Saunders is taking his mind off Brenda’s physicality with some composition exercises. He’s a stylist. Not in the hairdressing sense, although he did try that once, briefly, with the idea that a secular confessor might gather a rich crop of material from his customers. No, James is a prose stylist — his novel is never going to be described as rollicking.
King Edward’s was rare among state schools in offering Latin through to A-Level. James relishes the dead language spoken, for its precise, merciless exertion of tongue, teeth and lips, but even more he delights in its glinting density on the page. A conventional English paragraph, by comparison, is spattered with ugly little words that say nothing much — pronouns, conjunctions, articles. If English could be rendered down to a comparable density, might it not answer Latin’s mineral glint with something glistening, urgent, wet with life?
It’s not only the little words that have to go. Punctuation is like a disease on the skin of the language, a nasty, nannying obsession of amateurs and minnow-minded school-teachers. On this point James agrees with his great Irish namesake, the writer he calls the Exile and whose faded bespectacled photograph, cut from the TLS a decade ago, is still tacked to his wardrobe door: perverted commas can have no place in his dialogue.
Then there is the question of voice, of seamlessly reconciling authorial omniscience and the immediacy of character; his whole armoury of means and devices must be smoothly confluent with the course of the narrative, the whole sliding inexorably towards its crisis as a river to the sea.
Flawed world, James types, flawless apple. Glossy anomaly, turn you over yes unblemished skin a Monet sky, spotless bruiseless, flesh like crisp snow: temptation to believe in fated love. Minutes later, acid taste lingering, exposed core browning. True love: false love.
The cursor blinks. He nods. Adds a mark to a long tally he’s made on a library ticket. Deletes. Tries again.
‘I have a story for you. Just to remind a married man what he’s missing.’
Dan Mock rolls his eyes. ‘Go on, then.’ He looks forward to these meetings, which alternate between London and Reading. This cosy pub in Little Venice, a short walk from Mike’s flat, is a favourite rendezvous.
‘So it’s like this,’ begins Mike, in a low, conspiratorial voice. ‘I have a date, name of Victoria, who’s a friend of a friend of Pete’s. I’ve got tickets for Betrayal, and we’re supposed to meet in the foyer, and then have dinner afterwards. Problem is, she doesn’t show. Doesn’t answer her phone. These are great tickets, and I don’t want to waste them. What do I do?’
‘Phone a friend?’ suggests Dan.
‘No time for that — it starts in five minutes. So I go outside and call out, “One free ticket for the performance starting now! Best seat in the house! Only catch is that you have to sit next to me!” It takes a few goes, but eventually there’s a taker. She’s an older woman, forty, maybe, but —’
‘— strangely attractive,’ contributes Dan, setting down his pint.
‘Not only that, but she’s the kind of woman I’m drawn to. Spirited. Says her name is Carmen. Intense, spirited women are, as you know, my passion. So we’re watching the play, and just before the interval I get a text from Victoria: Mike, so sorry, bath overflowed, disaster, missed your calls on the tube. At the theatre now. Hope we can still hook up. Call me.’
‘For a minute I’m flummoxed, thinking of Victoria in the bath and not much else, but then the way ahead emerges with perfect clarity. At the interval, Carmen and I battle our way to the foyer and find her — Victoria — looking contrite and stunning. I explain the whole situation to both of them, and insist they watch the second half together while I wait in the bar.’ Dan frowns.
‘It’s the only way you could fulfil your obligations as a gentleman.’
‘Precisely. Anyway, it turns out the two girls get on like a theatre on fire. Afterwards, Carmen thanks us graciously and wishes us a good evening, but Vic’s having none of that, and invites her along to dinner. Of course, I’ve already changed the booking to three.’
‘I must be a mind-reader, because I can see where this is going.’
‘It is going there, but wait for the punch-line. Carmen turns out to be a sculptor, and I mention that I own a few pieces myself, and somehow we all agree to go back to my flat for a drink. We’ve already worked through a couple of bottles by now.’
‘I’ve definitely seen this one,’ says Dan. ‘While you’re making the drinks, the girls start getting friendly on the sofa. There’s a close-up shot of the glasses filling, and then the camera focus shifts to nascent frolics in the background.’
‘I kid you not,’ protests Mike. ‘That’s how it is. I guess they’re fired up by the play and the wine, impressed by my pad, whatever. Things are progressing pretty rapidly and I’m just rolling with it. We’re more than halfway around the bases, and I’m like this —’ he gestures with both his hands ‘— and they’re like this and like this, when the doorbell rings.’
‘You ignore it.’
‘Of course I do. But then I hear a key in the door.’
‘Who’s got a key?’
‘My fucking mother, that’s who! I’d left a set at her house months ago, when I was on holiday and she wanted a stopover in town. “Michael,” she calls softly. “Are you still up?” I’m up, alright. We all start to tidy ourselves sharpish, but within seconds there she is. I make introductions. The girls think it’s hilarious, of course. “I’m afraid I’ve been out on a jolly,” Mum says. “I would have called ahead but my phone died.” Her phone is always dying. She might guess the lie of the land but doesn’t let on, and before I know it the three of them are hooting with laughter.’
‘And then what?’
‘I went to bed. The sight of my dolled-up mother meant I wasn’t even capable of having a wank to let off steam.’
‘And now?’
‘We’re all Facebook friends. I don’t think I could see either of them without thinking of Mum. I’ve moved on to new pastures.’ He wags a finger at Dan’s tolerant smile. ‘Don’t even think of disapproving.’
He rises, clothes-pegging the empty glasses with finger and thumb, then leans and adds in a murmur, ‘Here’s a paradox of sorts. I savour each new girl, each conquest if you want to call them that, the act itself, its — its unique aesthetic details, for weeks or months afterwards. Years, in some cases. I’m a savourer, an appreciator, a connoisseur. And yet at the same time, I struggle to muster enthusiasm for a repeat performance with a girl I’ve been seeing for a month. God knows how you play the game to your rules. When I get back, you can tell me.’
Dan, watching his friend saunter to the bar, feels a blend of pity and envy characteristic of their alliance. Town mouse and country mouse. Fox and hedgehog. Tortoise and hare. Perhaps it’s just as well Mike keeps his liaisons short and shallow. As far as Dan can tell, he’s always respected his philandering and hapless father more than the formidable mother who funded his education. An appreciator? Of X, yes — of half of what life has to offer — but not of Y, not of the whole equation.
Dan feels comfortable defending his own position. His marriage is not a whirlwind of passion, and he has the potential Achilles heel that Natalie was his first and only. But he’s considered this many times: his reward is something finer, a complex, maturing bond of which Mike, for all his japes, knows nothing. Not X, not Mike’s territory, but Y. Right?
‘Well?’ prompts the japer, returning from the bar. ‘Playing the lurrve game?’
‘I suppose the main difference is that I’m not playing a game.’
Mike mouths the last five words in time with him — he considers his answer trite. Dan shrugs.
Later: he has cut it fine, and jogs along the foot tunnel towards the mainline station. As he takes the stairs two at a time, he misses his footing, plunges forward, and is one inch from knocking out his front teeth on the top step.
He stands up carefully, tests his jarred back and climbs into the vast chill of the station as though from an airlock into outer space, fingertips on his surprisingly intact teeth. Can he blame the beers this time and the slippers last time? Or does he need to slow down? Is he getting old already?
On the platform, two people he took to be strangers suddenly kiss. The world is full of possibility.