Singularity

by Charlotte Grimshaw

  ‘Wha’?’ his father snarled.

  Ford felt a tremor of doubt, but pressed on.

  ‘Would you like to meet for a coffee?’ he asked. May hadn’t taken her eyes from his face.

  ‘Coffee? Fuck!’ There was a blaring noise, as if he’d actually blown his nose into the receiver.

  Ford named a café.

  ‘The what and what? What? Fuck!’

  On the appointed day, as they made their way down through Albert Park, May squeezed his hand and said, ‘This’ll be interesting.’

  Ford said nothing. It was a warm, bright morning. Around the fountain the gulls shifted watchfully on their red feet. They passed the statue of Queen Victoria; some joker had put an empty beer bottle in the crook of her arm. Doubt was wafting through him like a cold little breeze. He didn’t want it to be too interesting; neither did he want May to be too ‘interested’. He wondered why he hadn’t thought to have a preliminary meeting.

  Forty-five minutes later, walking back up the hill, May was silent and grim-faced and no longer holding Ford’s hand. He escorted her to her car, looking on hopelessly as she wrenched on her seatbelt and slammed the door. She wound down the window and said in a high voice, ‘How could a person (he could tell she wanted to say creature) like that have produced you and Simon? How is it possible?’

  A pain concentrated itself in his stomach. All thought of making light of the debacle, of salvaging it with a joke, drained away. He turned and walked off, his eyes stinging. He couldn’t tell her anything then, let alone the things that hurt him most. Simon looks like their mother. So do their sisters. Ford, of all the siblings, is the only one who physically resembles Aaron Harris. The bad one. The Other.

  After May drove off that day he thought it was the end of everything. He had lost her. He could hardly blame her if she never wanted to see him again. He locked himself away, threw himself into his work. He felt tainted, utterly depressed. About Aaron Harris he had a dull feeling of hopelessness, beyond anger. He dreamed he was entering a room to see May leaving with Simon, waving goodbye, her smooth brown arm jingling with bracelets. ‘Simon’s just like you,’ she trilled, ‘only he’s good.’ (Though even in that dream he felt nothing but love for his brother. No jealousy, only sadness.)

  He was in a bad state, delivering his lectures in a monotone, drooping about the common room, poisoning himself with instant coffee. At the end of that week he had an appointment with a student who’d sidled up to him after a lecture and confessed her difficulty with the area they were covering. He faced up to her, warily, because there was something unusual about her manner, a wrong note. Ms Smith was her name. Her mouth quivered with nerves when she talked and he’d noticed a habit she had of pulling her jersey off the shoulder, wiggling her flesh, and staring at him during lectures with an insanely fixed expression. When he got out his diary and offered her half an hour to go over the subject she let out a shocked little laugh, as if he’d suggested something terribly risqué. He looked at her sourly.

  Ms Smith was late. He poked his head out and saw her at the end of the corridor, apparently picking up some Xeroxes. She looked up, made a big thing of hurrying along. He got her seated across the desk, as far away from him as possible, and asked her what she didn’t understand. They went over the topic, but it was hopeless; all she did was stare and laugh and twist her fingers in her hands, until, irritated beyond belief, he felt like asking her, ‘Would you prefer it if I just unzipped my fly?’

  There was a silence. The phone rang. He lunged for it, grateful for a break from her twitching gaze.

  ‘Hello,’ May said, and he slid back in his seat and felt something in his body woozily rearranging itself.

  ‘Hello,’ he said huskily, ‘I didn’t expect you to call.’

  ‘Why not?’ she said. Oh happiness. Why not?

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said. He glanced up. Ms Smith had fixed her eyes on the glass paperweight on his desk, within which the yellow light from the window burned.

  ‘Mmm,’ May said. ‘My nephew made me take him to the Observatory yesterday. He told me about supermassive black holes. Did you know there’s a giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy? In three billion years we’re going to collide with the next-door galaxy, Andromeda. He tells me this will throw us into the black hole. The end of Earth. So I thought I’d ring you.’

  Ford laughed.

  She was suddenly brisk. He heard the jingle of her bracelets. ‘Shall I pick you up after work? About six?’ (Yes. Anything.)

  ‘I’ll be here.’

  He hung up, rubbed his hands, smiled dewy-eyed at Ms Smith. He could have hugged her.

  ‘Where were we?’ he said, grinning like a wolf.

  But she stood up, clutching her books to her chest.

  ‘I get it now,’ she said, blushing desperately. A piece of paper slid out of her bundle and swooped across the floor.

  ‘Oh? Really? I’d be perfectly happy to …’

  ‘I understand,’ she said, clutching at her papers, crashing against the chair. A mad, rigid smile spread across her face. She rushed away.

  May came to collect Ford in her little car. They went to a restaurant. He wasn’t going to mention Aaron Harris, but after a few wines May did and laughed, shrieked about it in fact. She was tough; you couldn’t deny it. (Or was there something slightly hysterical in her tone?) Ford told her he admired her, that she was brilliant. He held her hand. Happy times. They went back to his house. They fell into a routine after that: nights, whole weekends together. A few months later she moved out of her flat and into his house. Later, they got married. He asked her; she said yes. Then she rolled onto her back (they were lying on the bed) stuck her elegant, pointy-toed leg in the air and said, ‘I think you’ll make an excellent first husband.’

  It’s lucky and rare, isn’t it, to find a person who makes you laugh. He was lucky. Had been lucky. Was.

  These nights. The cat climbed in the window and disturbed his sleep, purring and kneading the sheet with its claws. He heard the car alarm yowling. Loneliness. Nightmares. He dreamed the cat was at the end of the bed, an arm dangling from its mouth. Something moved in the ceiling (a rat?). The sound of jingling. There were policemen knocking on his door. Then he was back in the café years ago, introducing his father to May …

  ‘A black lady!’ Aaron Harris says. He looks as if he can’t believe his luck. He gives a gruesome wink, pulls a bottle out of his pocket and tips cheap sherry into the coffee Ford puts in front of him. May, seated across from him, goes still. Ford should take her by the arm and leave but something makes him freeze, his stomach thrilling with little shocks, as though he were standing at the edge of a cliff.

  ‘Queen of spades,’ Aaron goes on happily. ‘You know what they say about the black ones. Where’d you pick her up? Good fuck? Looks handy. Nice tits. You’ve got nice ones, dear. Where do you work? K Road? Sauna and massage? Curry special, on the house?’

  He has yellow skin. Shaking hands. Finishing the coffee, he goes on swigging from the bottle he keeps in his pocket. His glasses hang around his neck on a plastic chain. His teeth, when he laughs, are flecked with black. His voice is rising, lines of foam form on the sides of his mouth. Two waitresses are whispering; the man behind the counter is coming to ask them to leave.

  ‘What colour your kids going to be? But you won’t want kids. Won’t want to spoil her. Keep her fuckable every night. Don’t want some saggy old black bitch on your hands.’

  The inside of his mouth is dark purple. His laugh is high, crazy. Ford can’t speak. May is motionless, she simply can’t believe. There is something Ford wants to explain to her, to everyone in the café: my father is not really like this. This (this performance) is an act of will, something he is doing to me. He knows you can’t use these words, say these things. He is saying them to hurt me. Violence.

  The old fist clenched, shaking. The café in a small uproar, other customers thrilled by the drama, the owner hovering over them with his cordless p
hone, ‘I’m sorry I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’

  He shouts, with a spray of spit. ‘Get away from me. I’ll go when I like. Fucker.’ His eyes are grey slits. It’s May who gets up, takes Ford’s arm and pulls him away.

  ‘Little cunt,’ he shouts after them, as they leave.

  Perhaps Ford was wrong about it being a performance. Perhaps that was the real Aaron Harris. The thing that was left, now that he’d burnt the life out of himself, and everything good was gone.

  He woke at dawn. Grey light, iron thoughts. This world. May who was good was dead. Aaron Harris, who was bad, was alive, and spinning round the city like a black hole. Ford had seen Aaron not long ago, when he was driving home. The old skeleton bent against the wind on Symonds Street, his coat flapping around his knees. He was toiling through the dusk towards whatever flophouse or pub he had in his sights. Cold misery. Ford thought of back alleys, grimy windows, dead-eyed girls. Aaron’s ‘boarding house’ was four rooms above a brothel. The Land of Opportunity was the establishment’s jaunty name. Mornings he took tea and sherry downstairs with the girls. What did May have in mind when she said ‘Dickensian’? A cheerful old gent — down on his luck but a heart of gold. The puppy he dotes on, the urchins he befriends … Aaron Harris was addicted to prescription drugs. In the brothel he sometimes participated in drug deals. (No doubt breakfast degenerated quickly into vicious transacting, all-out brawls.) How did Ford know this? Aaron had told him, in one of many abusive late-night phone calls. Ford gave up changing his number when Aaron took to ringing the department secretary. He spoke to her politely but the threat was there. He knew he was Ford’s secret. That Ford could not let it be known he was the son of a person so crazy, so debased. He used to daydream that Warren Lampton was his father. But he does not look like Warren. He does not look like his mother. He has the height, the build, of Aaron Harris.

  May stood between Ford and all this — between Ford and who he is.

  Once, when he and his mother were mulling over some crime of Aaron Harris — after they left he’d rocketed around them like a suburban terrorist, never having accepted their flight — Ford lost his temper and shouted at her, ‘What were you thinking?’ Strange question to throw at one’s mother, like an exasperated parent. How could you have been so stupid as to have conceived me?

  ‘I was very young,’ she said. (Eighteen.) ‘I got pregnant. What you did then was get married. Of course it was a mistake.’

  Then she added hastily, ‘A mistake to marry him. But not a mistake having you. You take after my father, not him.’

  She has always loved Ford. No small feat, when you consider how she could have been put off him by his resemblance to Aaron. She is like Simon, good-natured, straight. She and Warren Lampton are a happy couple, both overweight and freckly and wholesome. He is literal-minded, somewhat solemn, whereas she, through natural intelligence and early harsh experience, has a cynical, humorous edge. Once she’d realised her mistake, she set out to make things right. It was a shrewd move marrying Warren. He was a town-planning expert back then; now he deals in property, and owns houses and commercial buildings in Tauranga where they moved to get away from Auckland. They live in a big house on the sea front at Mount Maunganui. A tough, rich, benign old couple. Survivors.

  ‘Aaron wasn’t always mad,’ she told Ford, biting her lip and staring defensively at the backs of her hands. ‘He was clever. He was older, knew a lot; he had flair. I admired him. The drink destroyed him, that’s all.’

  Ford preferred to believe her. The drink destroyed him. Better that than his having been insane from the day he was born.

  At dawn the cat jumped silently off the bed and went out the window. It spent most nights with Ford, but still he did not know where it lived.

  After a bad night of dreams, the cat coming and going, the birds seeming to start up indecently early, Ford felt unexpectedly good. It was a hot bright day, the sky cloudless, the light glancing off cars and the wind turning the leaves and making them shine. He stood in the garden, holding the newspaper. The cat, the bird murderer, wound itself round his legs. Its name was Ticket — this he knew because it had a tiny collar round its neck with the name in scrolly lettering surrounded by quotation marks, and a phone number. Someone fed Ticket, yet they must lock him out at night. Ford didn’t have the heart to do so himself. Something wound tight in him welcomed the cat’s nightly disturbances — he feared going into too deep a sleep, relaxing too much and being caught unawares. By what? He did not know.

  The recycling truck came rumbling along the street. The shirtless brigands who collected the bottles jumped off the back of it, scooping up the bins and hurling the contents into the skip. A lot of glass was being dropped and smashed on the road. When this happened they laughed. Gap-tooth brown faces. Terrific legs and torsos — all that running. Ford looked down at himself and thought he might try going for a run, at night when no one could see him. This, like ideas of travel, gave him a fluttery, weightless feeling of excitement. Getting in shape. The new Ford. On good days the world seemed full of possibility, new beginnings. On bad days he feared that without May he was sinking, and that he would turn into the thing she had shielded him from. Otherness.

  He decided to walk to work. It was already hot at 8.30 am. Summer was here, after the terrible winter. A relief. He had developed a hatred of the cold, having spent the lonely months after May’s death shivering in his badly insulated villa, lacking the will to get its cracks seen to. In the evenings he’d simply put on extra layers of clothes, until he must have looked like a tramp, crouched under the lamp with his books. Beady-eyed, snappish. The soiled coffee mug on the table, the grimy spoon sticking out of the tin of beans. (Oh God.) His bed was piled with rugs and quilts. He wore two pairs of socks, and cranked up the gas fire; it got less effective as the winter wore on, until there was only a small radius in which he could move without being frozen.

  May and Ford had bought the house, a picturesque villa, during the previous summer. The gas fire looked nice, with its fake pile of rustic logs, but it gave off little heat, and gusts of cold air blew down the chimney. May would never have stood for such discomfort, but would have sprung into efficient action at the first sign of winter, summoning builders, plumbers, insulating experts. She had consulted her mother (Mrs J was a seasoned drover of tradesmen and domestic help) and had intended to install underfloor heating, ceiling and wall insulation. But after she died, left to himself, Ford had simply weathered it.

  The lowest point was a rainy weekend when he couldn’t get up. Simon found him on Saturday afternoon, wearing a ski hat, the covers drawn up to his neck. He’d ignored the thumps on the door, until eventually Simon climbed in Ticket’s window, landing on the end of Ford’s bed. Ford said nothing. He had turned his face to the wall.

  ‘Christ. The state of this place.’

  Ford wouldn’t look at him.

  ‘I’m going to get Karen. She’s waiting in the car.’ Things were serious, his tone implied: something had to be done.

  He brought her in and Ford heard them muttering in the hall, then their children thumping through the place, and Karen telling them to go out in the yard. Simon appeared with a cup of tea and said, unhappily, ‘Come on, mate.’

  He sat up, letting out an evil waft from the covers, and reached for the cup. And then, horror, he felt a hot wetness start at the corners of his eyes.

  ‘Nice hat,’ Simon said. Ford ducked his head, let out a snicker of laughter.

  Simon smiled briefly and pulled up the blind, letting in the cold grey light. Karen appeared at the door, surveying the bedroom with nodding, tight-lipped resolve. Ford sat marooned in his foul nest — it would have been more embarrassing to get up and reveal what he was wearing — and stared at them, marvelled at them really. What good people they were. (How could they stand to be near him?) Simon was picking up cups and dirty plates; Karen was rolling up her sleeves and muttering about ‘popping up to the shops for what we’ll need’. They kept
glancing at each other, little wordless communications. With a jerk of her head — her hands were full of empty tin cans — she indicated a soiled pizza box; he nodded, looked over at Ford, then at the door, suggesting they give him a bit of space. This was how they communicated over the heads of their children.

  When they’d tactfully withdrawn, Ford rose from the stinking scratcher and pulled on some clothes. He tottered out to the kitchen. It was, he had to admit, a pretty bad scene.

  ‘I suppose I’ve let myself go, slightly,’ he said to Karen.

  She straightened up, holding a bulging rubbish bag in one hand, and laughed. Actually laughed. And then she put her hand on his shoulder — she’d never touched him before — and said, ‘How about you take the children somewhere. They’ll just get in the way.’

  Marcus, Claire, Elke and Ford, dismissed, made their way to the park, where he stood about dreamily and watched them play in the light rain. He felt pale and trembly, like an invalid allowed out after weeks of illness. The children took his hands and pulled him along to the shops, where they persuaded him to buy the drinks and sweeties that Karen had banned from their diet; then they wandered along the shop fronts looking at the junk in The Treasure Chest and Sanjay’s Antiques. The rain got heavy and thundered on the shop verandahs.

  He took them to a café and bought meat pies, and sat dreaming in the warm fug. Elke, the middle child, was adopted. Nice, prosaic Marcus looked like his mother: those clear, unimaginative eyes. Claire — he wasn’t sure. She was darker and more angular than her pretty blond brother. She had long fingers, coarse, wiry hair and an intense, narrow face, all sensitive nose and pointy chin. Ford had hoped she would turn out to look like his mother, but there was something in her harsh, mocking laugh — she cracked up at the slightest opportunity — that reminded him of …