Smythe's Theory of Everything

by Robert Hollingworth

  I thought about other things we can’t see - gravity or the passage of light. But these unseen elements influence physical conditions. Time doesn’t influence anything. We think time causes aging, but it doesn’t at all. Aging is a biological condition. And when something moves from here to there it’s not time that causes it - time leaves no impression on the physical world at all. No, I decided, it’s motion that prompts us, as self-aware beings, to devise a system to measure it. We live in motion, not time.

  And what about space? Well, we can’t ‘see’ that either, and space too, influences nothing in the physical world. No wonder Einstein decided to consider the two ideas as one. Time and space: shouldn’t they be the subject of philosophy and not science? Somewhere out on the edge of my consciousness I began to see another possibility for the state of things, a physical universe not hampered by these contrivances.

  That afternoon I took a pencil and a packet of typing paper and went to the kitchen table. I wrote in large letters on the first sheet, The Theory of Everything, just as Milo had.

  The first thing was to define the subject. Not existence, not life, not the universe. Everything in this context seemed vague, so finally I settled on the simple words: the big picture. And then over a period of many months I began to create a workable scheme free of time, a system that would be beautiful, poetic, seamless and elliptical, like the big picture itself.

  I cannot remember leaving that kitchen table until some time in 1987.

  This morning all hell erupted. The woman from Hades, Matron Collier, hit the roof, did her block, threw a tantrum. I knew nothing of it until I alighted for breakfast. The staff were scampering around terrified as though someone’s head might roll, doors banged, cups rattled and voices trembled. What had happened? I wheeled up close to Jim.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I say.

  Jim’s old head rocks backwards.

  ‘Clem went out to the yard this morning and picked every flower off Collier’s shrub!’ he whispers. ‘He put them in his pockets, down his jumper, stuffed them into his wheelchair and then took the whole lot back to his room. Dell found him and tried to take the flowers. Clem’s voice went up three octaves. Then he started waving his arms and fell right out of his chair!’

  Jim clams up just as Dell Williams comes briskly by. Then he leans in.

  ‘Collier turned up at Clem’s room and saw the carnage. She went to his window and saw her decimated shrub. She screamed at him sitting on the floor. For that, the good old man gave her a jolly good whack across the shins with his walking stick. Collier screamed again and then she tripped and went down as well. Pandemonium!’ Jim’s eyes widen and he can’t hide the grin. He saw the whole thing, lucky bugger. If only I had chosen not to shower! Clem is right next door to my room yet I knew nothing of the whole episode until I arrived at breakfast. Of course Clem wasn’t at the table. And now that I am back in my room he isn’t next door either. I think they must have taken him away. Poor old bugger.

  Chris has phoned and will be here in an hour - have I got a story for him! And so far no-one has dared go into the yard or approach the gardenia, not even Collier herself. I must say it does look a bit forlorn denuded of its flowers and buds.

  Clem stripped Collier’s bush! Wish I’d thought of it myself.

  Chris came as expected and brought a friend with him, I think from the ashram or whatever temple it is they belong to. I hardly recognised Chris at first. He had on a sort of cream caftan and I was reminded of my days as a palmist. Of course, caftans were common then, but now it seems odd, to put it mildly, to see the boy in robes with blue jeans and sandals sticking out the bottom. His hair is gone, cropped short like Pistol Pete’s, and he looks even more moon-faced. While I was appraising him he introduced me to his friend, but for the life of me I cannot remember his name. Something foreign-sounding, perhaps a moniker chosen by his religion.

  And Phe came past at the same time. She came to my door and looked in soon after Chris and whatsisname arrived. She didn’t stop but I had the distinct impression that she smiled - and at me, not at the ludicrous outfit of my son. For a while I was thinking about her and was not listening to what Chris was saying. Suddenly I was aware of Chris’s voice and I heard something like, ‘ … it will give you positive energy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s science behind it, Dad. We are well aware of the benefit of ions in the atmosphere. And we know that the universe is really just a mass of molecules - the whole of life is just protons and electrons vibrating within a positive energy field.’

  ‘E equals mc squared,’ his friend says. The two lads have decided they have a firm grasp of modern physics.

  ‘So what do you say, Dad?’

  ‘Say about what?’

  ‘About receiving the energy.’ I wonder if he has something gift-wrapped hidden in the folds of his Jesus robes. He gets up and closes the door.

  ‘Sit here, Dad,’ he says, and pats the bed. I ease out of the wheelchair and plonk myself down on the mattress between them. Suddenly Chris takes one of my hands and his friend grabs the other. I begin to feel alarmed.

  ‘Just relax, Dad,’ Chris says. ‘Let the forces pass through you. Accept the positive energy we offer you today.’

  They close their eyes and the lad on my left begins to hum. Chris joins in, making a kind of brmm brmm noise not unlike he did with toy cars as a child. An oomm takes over and then mwoor. Chris’s hand is warm and clammy, his friend’s is as cold as charity. He gives my hand a little squeeze and I have my hopes that the positive energy will very soon arrive. Nothing has changed since the days people pushed Ouija boards on Saturday nights.

  I began to think of Pheona standing in the door. Was she coming to see me again? For a moment I remembered Kitty. Pheona is sixteen, the same age Kitty was when she marched into an Indian restaurant in Sydney and landed her first job. My darling Kitty, dead these past sixteen years. Gone to Heaven, Chris would say, and perhaps be reborn. Come to think of it, Pheona was born the year Kitty died and she is a lot like my sister was - well, at least sometimes. The oooms and aaahs start to fade. The two men open their eyes. Chris smiles.

  ‘What do you think, Dad? What did you feel?’

  ‘Nothing terribly out of the ordinary,’ I tell him. ‘But I was thinking … You know that reincarnation stuff you people believe in …’

  ‘It’s us now, Dad. We welcome you as one of us, we accept you into our hearts and minds.’

  ‘OK, thanks son. But I was wondering about that reincarnation thing. How long does someone have to be dead before they come back as someone else?’

  ‘These are the great mysteries, Dad. These are things for which there is no agenda.’

  ‘Do they come back as a better person or just a different person?’

  ‘They may not come back as a person at all,’ his friend offers.

  ‘Do they come back at the same age, or do they start all over again?’

  Chris smiles. ‘Don’t worry, Dad. I have a feeling you’ll outlive us all.’

  With that, the two gurus get up and stretch, their beatific smiles turning the curtains green. I get back in my wheelchair and we go into the passage. His friend moves away so I beckon to Chris and he brings his ear down close to me.

  ‘Chris, it’s not a problem or anything, I mean, it doesn’t really concern me at all … but I was just wondering, son, are you gay?’ The boy gives me such a look you’d think I slapped him.

  Jim says Clem has been banned from the courtyard. What on earth are they thinking? Clem has trouble finding it, let alone planning a criminal act. As for that, Jim says all Clem wanted was some flowers to attend his wife’s funeral. And where was the man to get flowers? Collier’s fucking bush is the only bit of greenery for miles. That is why Clem wasn’t in his room yesterday. They took him to the service and I hope he managed to put a few of Collier’s precious white gardenias on his wife’s grave.

  Regardless, I’m betting he’s had it with this sorry hous
e of incarceration. I don’t know if they ever let him see his wife - he has certainly never mentioned her and no-one else seems to know she existed. So now he is confined to his room. If he’s not at lunch I intend visiting him afterwards. What a way for an old man to end up.

  Of course, for a year or two I lived in hibernation at Grace House. After Kitty, I began to hate the Richmond flat and when a room came up at the Grace I moved right in. But I just buried myself and kept on with my Theory of Everything, head down arse up in that dark interior, dis-placing the past. And then about 1990 I rejoined normal society. The catalyst was the men I could see from my window playing petanque in the backyard. Soon after, I joined the group. And a month later, there came a second catalyst in the form of Veronica Phillips.

  They say your first big relationship is not the right one - if ‘right’ can be regarded as the appropriate adjec-tive. In any case, I agree, and when I met Veronica I felt we were much more suited. She liked the outdoors for a start, though her sporting obsession was in a field entirely new to me. She was English, having arrived in Australia with her mother soon after the War. Now in her forties, she had a job at the Grace doing the books three times a week. By chance I met her on the stairs when I was taking my canvas case of petanque balls back to my room. We got talking - she’d seen our group out on the gravel carpark and wanted to know all about the game. Like small children and dogs, it turned out that a bag of balls is a good topic when it comes to meeting the opposite sex.

  One night she invited me home for dinner, a pleasant change from our overcrowded dining room. Later we went into her lounge and I said, ‘Give us a look at your gear, V’. I used to call her V sometimes; she seemed to like it. Of course if we’d been in our twenties rather than our late forties she might have interpreted the comment differently but Veronica knew exactly what I meant. She was gone a minute and returned with her equipment. I sat on the couch and Veronica placed an unstrung longbow across my knee and opened a big case full of arrows, all sitting neatly in their notched positions.

  Veronica went in for archery. I have no idea why - she couldn’t seem to remember herself - but I’m guessing it had something to do with her English history, Robin Hood and all that. Of course, the longbow was made famous by the English - it’s how they managed to defeat the French in the Middle Ages. An arrow could travel 400 yards, well over twice the length of a football field. Before the enemy could get anywhere near a decent stoush the English bowmen had already unleashed clouds of arrows that could penetrate armour and chainmail like poking a hole in butter. Veronica may not have known it, but some of those longbowmen might have been her ancestors.

  I looked at the sleek instrument she’d placed before me, noting its glossy curves.

  ‘What about the string,’ I said. ‘A bow’s just a bent stick without a string, isn’t it?’

  She was not amused but took a waxed cord from her kit and slid it into position, using her body to flex the bow. I fell in love with her immediately. She passed the bow back to me.

  ‘Don’t draw it, Jack,’ she told me. ‘If you release the bowstring without an arrow you can damage the bow - at the very least you’ll break the string.’

  She picked out a nice arrow to show me, carbon alloy shaft, the flights cut from a real feather, light as a breath of air. She got out a finger tab and a forearm guard and showed me how you wear them. She took out a chest guard with leather straps.

  ‘Ladies wear them,’ she said. ‘To protect the right breast.’

  We glanced at each other.

  ‘Put it on,’ I said.

  She hesitated and then strapped it across her chest.

  ‘Show me what you do,’ I said and held out the bow. Veronica stood up and I sat back on the couch and watched the woman notch an arrow, spread her legs and place her feet firmly in the shagpile and draw the bow fully. She placed her lips to a little ‘kisser button’ on the string and allowed the fingers of her left hand to relax so that her palm did little more than push the bow away from her, arrow fully drawn, ready to fly. For a moment in that lounge room light I saw an Amazon in full profile, a warrior ready to slay her mortal foe. And I fell in love a second time.

  Before replacing the equipment I watched her take a cloth and wipe it carefully just as I might do with my petanque balls. She looked longingly into the big case.

  ‘Anyway, I’ve given it up, Jack.’

  ‘What, archery? Why?’

  She clipped the lid shut on the big box. I expected her to say she’d just outgrown it, just as most people eventually do with their chosen sport.

  ‘It’s a long story. Not important.’

  ‘I’d really like to know, V, we’re friends aren’t we?’

  Veronica tossed her shock of black hair and plonked down on the couch beside me.

  ‘I stabbed the club president.’

  ‘Yes, that should do it,’ I said. ‘You got kicked out?’

  ‘Well, there was a bit more to it than that.’

  She poured me another glass of Moselle. A beer would have been fine, but wine for dinner was suddenly the fashion - Blue Nun, Black Tower, Mateus Rose; no modern home was complete without it.

  ‘The president’s name is Chalmers, Greg Chalmers, and he thinks he’s a pretty good archer - well he is, in actual fact. But what else can you expect - he has the best equipment money can buy, a compound bow with stabilisers, string tamers, dampers, bumpers, so much stuff hanging off it that it shoots straight all by itself. It got so that those who spent the most money on the best gear won all the trophies. So one night at a meeting I proposed that we build a field shooting circuit. It wasn’t an original idea, and the club outside Eltham has plenty of country to do it in. It’s much like a golf course through the bush - you move from target to target set up near the ground to simulate a natural experience. I also suggested we should only use basic longbow equipment, no stabilisers and no sights on the bow. Chalmers voted against it, but the majority voted with me and our members set about building the course.’

  One thing about Veronica, she was a good talker.

  ‘At first Chalmers tried to pretend he wasn’t interested, but then he found a way to lay some claim to the idea. It so happened that he owned a Labrador that he’d trained to find lost arrows. That dog was remarkable. Arrows that miss the target have a way of sliding right under the grass and sometimes they’re completely hidden. They’re not cheap, Jack, as you can imagine, and you can’t afford to lose a good arrow. But young Fossy could put her nose down and find those shafts every time. Chalmers volunteered his dog to help out around the field shoot and the next thing we know he muscles in like he owns the game.’

  ‘You don’t seem to like him.’

  Veronica cast me a disdainful look.

  ‘You might say that. Anyway, it’s a long story.’

  ‘Tell me, V, I’d like to know.’

  ‘Well … I usually refused to shoot with Chalmers, but one day I lost the toss and we were partnered up to do the circuit. And deep in the bush, half way through the course, the bugger assaulted me. I was bending to retrieve my arrows when the man grabbed me in a most ungentlemanly way, pushed me to the ground and tried to put his big slobbering lips on my face. I shouted at him and, without thinking, jabbed an arrow right into his thigh. Eventually, everyone knew what had happened. But the whole thing was just pushed aside - he was club president after all.’

  ‘So you left.’

  ‘Not immediately, no.’

  ‘You persevered.’

  ‘Hmmm, that’s one way of putting it. In May I put my name down for the field shoot as usual and did the round with a nice young kid - the son of one of our members. He didn’t really go for the sport and just wandered off. But on the sixth target I took aim through the trees and fired just as Chalmers’ dog loped onto the path. My arrow went straight into the dog. It let out an awful yelp and disappeared into the bush.’

  I gave a little whistle.

  ‘Unfortunately Fossy went all the way ba
ck to clubhouse, dashed into the kitchen and collapsed right in front of half our members. The boy who was supposed to be with me also ran back to the clubhouse and reported it, even though he’d witnessed none of it. Chalmers was livid. He refused to believe it was an accident - as if I’d shoot a dog, even his. Oddly, I think the man would have accepted the whole thing if the dog had died elegantly with an arrow through the heart. But Fossy had been facing away from me and the shaft went into her neck behind the ear. And she ran a hundred metres before finally dropping on the kitchen floor with one of my Eclipse Alloys sticking out of her right eye.’

  Sitting there in Veronica’s lounge I saw her in new light. A moment earlier I’d seen her standing astride, bow arm extended with a leather arm guard, breast plate tight and an arrow notched at full draw. A relax of the string and that shaft would have penetrated the plaster wall, through to the next one and on into the neighbour’s flat. Now I saw a woman whose great power had suddenly been redirected - to accidentally undo all that she loved.

  We sat in silence a long time, just staring into the room.

  Suddenly she said, ‘I killed Chalmers’ dog; it was my fault.’

  ‘No it wasn’t; it was an accident.’

  ‘If I’d looked more carefully, if I’d had my wits about me, the dog would still be alive, Jack. I might be found innocent but I still affected the way things worked out.’

  I suddenly thought of Kitty and a dark cloud descended. Neither of us spoke. The oil heater came on and ticked as it warmed; something creaked in the ceiling.