Slowly, and in the absence of any competition, Justin began thinking of Peter as a friend. Peter wasn’t exactly a social asset, but he was sympathetic, intelligent, and his dogged constancy appealed to Justin.
At school, their friendship attracted attention, as pretty much everything at a secondary school did.
‘Hey, look! It’s Stephen Hawking and Head Case.’ A pasty-faced group of younger boys sat on a wall outside the school gate at all hours, stabbing limp, fatty chips with wooden forks and jeering at anything that moved.
Peter stopped and looked at them with clinical detachment.
‘Sometimes I wonder how their brains work,’ he said, resuming his walk alongside Justin, ‘whether there’s a mechanism by which serotonin is released in the process of attempting to demean others. It would explain a lot about the endemic nature of bullying.’
‘Maybe they’re just cretins. Maybe they’ve been subjected to foetal dumb-arse syndrome in the womb.’
Peter smiled. ‘Just as likely. Still, it makes you wonder.’
‘It makes you wonder.’
As they passed another set of jeering boys, Peter stumbled, deftly knocking one of the ringleaders off the wall with his elbow. The boy fell backwards with a satisfying thump, unleashing a volley of abuse. Justin and Peter ran.
They slowed a few blocks later, laughing.
‘Nice move,’ Justin said.
‘Won’t make him friendlier next time.’
‘You want to go back and rehabilitate him?’
Peter pulled the tennis ball out of his bag. As they stepped on to Luton Common, he threw it along the ground for Boy. ‘I meant to ask you,’ he began, without turning to face Justin.
Boy brought the ball back and Peter threw it again, in a long high arc. ‘What made you… I mean… why’d you change your name?’
Justin stopped. ‘It’s a long story.’
Boy caught the ball in mid-air halfway across the common, placed it carefully on the ground where he stood and returned without it to the boys. Justin reached down to stroke his head. ‘Have you ever felt like fate has it in for you?’
‘No,’ said Peter, frowning. ‘Have you?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s strange.’ Peter thought for a moment, then looked at Justin. ‘What does that have to do with changing your name?’
‘Your disguise?’
‘My disguise from fate. I’m hiding.’
‘Hiding?’
‘Yes.’
‘From fate?’
He nodded.
‘Wow.’ Peter blinked at him. ‘You’re serious?’
‘Yes.’
The silence lasted three-quarters of the way across the large expanse of withered grass.
‘Interesting,’ Peter said slowly. ‘Of course, I have thought rather a lot about predetermination, though perhaps not in exactly the way you mean. I sometimes get a feeling that something I remember hasn’t actually happened yet, but I’m not sure whether it really has happened and I’ve just forgotten that it has.’
He screwed up his face.
‘I mean, if we accept that the universe is cylindrical and energy eventually joins up with itself, perhaps thought runs along the outside of the cylinder as well, repeating ad infinitum.’ He looked animated at the possibility. ‘That could mean that a thought actually has happened – in the sense of having taken place somewhere in the universe – along the outside of the cylinder, but can’t exactly be attributed to me as an individual. Or not yet, anyway.’
Justin stared.
‘Let’s say, for instance, that you have the same dream over and over, only each time you’re not sure whether you actually had the same dream before or just dreamt that you did.’ He looked at Justin expectantly. ‘It could relate to the thinning boundaries between reality, that is to say active expenditure of energy, and thought, or passive energy. Either way, the existence of the act, or in this case, the dream, is not in doubt. The question you have to ask is how does it exist, and how do we define the energy of thought versus the energy of action. You’ve posed a very interesting question here.’
He paused.
‘Take Boy. Does he exist or doesn’t he? You see him, I see him. Is that enough to vouch for his existence? I would say it is. Surely there’s a point at which an idea conjured by more than one brain has existence, not merely in the philosophical sense, but in the sense of being the object of expended energy. I’m quite interested in thought as energy, as valid an expression of energy as –’ he paused, watching Boy race a squirrel to a tree – ‘as a running dog.’
Boy granted the squirrel freedom and it spiralled, panicked, up to safety.
‘It’s not exactly what you’d call fate. But possibly relevant in its way.’ Peter smiled apologetically.
Justin felt dazed by Peter’s string of connections. His own brain soared and crashed, groped endlessly for elusive footholds in reality. There were dark corners he didn’t dare enter, creaking catacombs lined with the corpses of doubt, incomprehension and paranoia. His brain didn’t grapple with theories, it grappled with fear.
They walked on in silence. A few hundred metres later where the road split, Justin stopped, wondering whether there was one last comment to be made. He couldn’t think of one.
‘Goodbye,’ he said.
Peter watched him go.
‘Justin!’
Justin turned.
‘I… I think you should meet my sister. She’d like you. I mean, you might like her too.’ The embarrassed smile. ‘Anyway, you should meet.’
Justin only nodded, but Peter looked pleased, as if something important had been settled.
Each boy headed home, deep in thought.