by Tim Lott
He was making a salad to go with the lamb chops. Even he couldn’t ruin a salad. The lamb chops were a different matter.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “Dr Ojebande is also black.”
Melchior nodded. “I thought you were the only one in this hick town.”
“Apparently not,” I replied, enjoying the smell of the seared lamb chops before my father burnt them.
He turned to me. “Honestly though, Strato. Do you like it here? Are you OK? Because it’s very different from London, isn’t it?”
I hesitated, wondering whether to tell the truth or not.
“I don’t mind it,” I said finally. “I’ll get used to it.”
Melchior looked dubious.
“And they do have a very good ice-cream shop,” I added.
“That’s true,” said Melchior, nodding as he tossed the salad. “But is a good ice-cream shop enough to make you live somewhere?”
I had learned a thing or two about how to avoid answering difficult questions by now.
“Are you happy here, Melchior?”
Melchior took the salad out of the bowl and put it on a plate with a slice of wholemeal bread.
“I know that your mother and I have our problems, but on the whole I like it here. Yes, I’m happy enough.”
I nodded and thought to myself, I shall see how true that is in about two hours time.
I turned towards the cooker, from where clouds of smoke were billowing.
“I think the chops are burning, Father.”
They were.
Melchior was lying about being happy. When I made myself invisible and crept downstairs later that night and hid in the corner of the front room again, I found out all about the situation between my parents.
There were no meals in front of the telly this time. Instead, Melchior and Peaches sat facing one another across the table that stands against the wall opposite the bay windows. They each had a large glass of red wine and very serious expressions on their faces.
I won’t tell you everything that was said. To be honest, it was all so shocking, I do not really remember the words. All I could think was how silly I had been to think I could do anything about it. And how close to the edge Peaches and Melchior really were, and that if they fell into the abyss, I would fall with them. Then perhaps I would be like Lloyd Archibald Turnbull, with only one parent, missing the other all the time.
At the heart of the problem, it turned out, was the fact that my father hadn’t resigned his job just because my mother had wanted to move to Hedgecombe. He had resigned his job because he had been having a “relationship” with a young woman called Annabel at his research laboratory. Apparently she was only twenty-three years old.
“Relationship” was not the word Peaches used. The word she used was much worse.
Peaches, it seemed, had found out about the relationship and as a consequence had insisted that they move away from London and as far away from this woman as possible. From what I could glean, Peaches had always wanted to live in the countryside anyway, and as an aspiring author, Hedgecombe-upon-Dray with its literary heritage appealed to her in particular. As penance for his impropriety, Melchior had agreed to give up his job and move away.
It seemed that Melchior had had little choice in the matter. It had been ship out to Hedgecombe or “this relationship is going up the wazoo,” to use Peaches’ less-than-poetic phrase.
I didn’t know what a wazoo was, but I guessed that it wasn’t a good place for a relationship to end up.
The point Melchior made vociferously and on several occasions that evening was that I had been punished because of his bad behaviour. I had been taken away from my school and friends, for instance. But Peaches had been positively glad for me to leave the school and enter the mainstream education system. She thought it would “socialize” me.
I got progressively more upset as the conversation went on. But the worst was still to come. Because there was another bone of contention between Melchior and Peaches. It turned out to be the mystery book that my mother was writing.
It seemed that my mother’s book was not a novel, as I had always imagined. It was a non-fiction book about the difficulties of being the parent of a gifted and talented child.
The title of the book was Welcome to the Geek Farm, and she had now signed a deal with the publisher Dorothea Beckwith-Hinds worked for.
My father, I learned, opposed my mother writing this book. He said that it would be harmful to me, and would invade my privacy. My mother responded by saying that she would, in due course, seek my approval, and anyway, it was her first and possibly only chance to be published and why couldn’t he care about her for once?
To which Melchior replied that it was because I was his son and it would upset me, which I thought was a good reply. But Peaches said that if he was so fond of his son, he shouldn’t have gone screwing around.
Melchior said that I was too young to be asked to approve or veto a project like this from my mother, and that even making me aware of its existence could hurt my feelings. He also pointed out that I might well give my approval even though I did not want to, out of a desire for her approbation. And furthermore, I wasn’t old enough to be aware of the possible consequences of such a book.
I should emphasize that this discussion did not proceed in a calm and orderly way. Voices were repeatedly raised, and tempers were severely frayed. Melchior’s temporary walk-out a few days previously seemed to indicate that he was already at the end of his tether, even though we had only been in Hedgecombe for a few weeks. Peaches, it appeared, interpreted this as him wishing to return to London to reunite with his lover.
Melchior replied that she hadn’t been his lover, merely someone he had had sex with on two occasions, and that he did not love her, that he loved Peaches and me. Peaches meanwhile insisted that he had betrayed her and that what he had done was unforgivable. Melchior replied that what she was doing with the book was equally unforgivable.
Then they fell into an awkward silence. Nothing, it appeared, had been achieved other than the airing of negative emotions.
Oddly enough, after I snuck back up to my room that night and made myself visible again, I felt better. Somehow, knowing what was at the heart of all the tension in the house made it easier to bear. I realized that it really wasn’t my fault after all. It was Melchior’s and Peaches’ fault, in equal measure as far as I could calculate. It had nothing to do with me whatsoever. That was a relief.
I must admit, I was taken aback by my mother’s intention to write the book, particularly by the implication of the title. As for my father’s indiscretion, what I found remarkable was that any young woman – even a “slut”, as my mother preferred to describe her – could have found him attractive in the first place. Thinning hair, somewhat pot-bellied, stoop-shouldered and ancient – forty-one years old – he struck me as an unlikely Lothario. However, it had been a pretty cheap trick to play on my mother, and now that I’d had time to think about it I was quite angry with him. But I knew that my father was a good and kind man. I supposed that he was flawed too – but then, who isn’t? Even heroes have their weaknesses.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE HAUNTING OF MRS AMBER TURNBULL
On Monday morning, I rose early – I didn’t want to be late again. In fact, I got up too early. I was left with about half an hour with nothing to do before leaving to catch the bus. I found myself daydreaming. I thought this sentence to myself: Time is really dragging. Then I started to think about time.
The expression “time is relative” is used colloquially to suggest that sometimes your perception of time is relative – sometimes it seems to go slowly, and sometimes it seems to go fast. But time really is relative. It’s elastic – it stretches and contracts.
If I jumped in a spaceship and headed for the nearest star, which (other than the Sun) is Alpha Centauri – about five light years away – and travelled there at close to the speed of light, then turned round and came back
again, I would be ten years older when I arrived back on Earth. But the people I had left behind on Earth – Melchior, Peaches, Lloyd Archibald Turnbull and Dr Ojebande, for example – would not be ten years older.
They would either be very old or dead of old age. A lot more time would have passed for them than for me.
This is not a theory, but a solid, experimentally proven fact. The closer you travel to the speed of light, the slower time goes for you – at least that’s the way it is for someone who isn’t travelling at close to the speed of light, which includes everyone on Earth.
People on Earth are only travelling at a little more than 1,600 kilometres per hour, which is the speed at which the Earth rotates on its axis. Or perhaps they are travelling at 108,000 kilometres per hour, which is the speed that the Earth goes round the Sun.
That’s the point, you see – you can only describe how fast you are going by having something to compare it to.
The only absolute in the universe is the speed of light. This never varies, which is thoroughly weird and magical. Let me give an example of how weird and magical it is.
Imagine you are driving a car along a road at 40 kilometres per hour.
Now imagine that, 80 kilometres away at the opposite end of the road, your father starts driving a car towards you at 40 kilometres per hour.
How long before you and your father reach one another?
Your speed, as far as you are concerned, is 40 kilometres per hour. That is the speed you are travelling at relative to the road. Your father is travelling at the same speed, 40 kilometres per hour, relative to the road.
You are travelling directly towards each other. So relative to one another your speed is 80 kilometres per hour.
Therefore, since you are 80 kilometres apart, you and your father will reach each other in precisely one hour.
Now imagine two laser-beam torches on the same road, 80 kilometres apart.
Imagine that the speed of light is 40 kilometres per hour (which obviously it isn’t, but bear with me).
You and your father are each standing next to one of these torches.
Imagine that, instead of travelling in a car, you and your father have the ability to ride on the solid beams of light that come from the laser torches.
Then, at exactly the same moment, someone switches the two torches on.
How long will it take you to reach one another?
Obviously the same amount of time as it would take if you travelled by car. One hour, right?
Wrong. It will take two hours.
Because the speed of light is not relative. It is always the same.
Of course, light does not travel at 40 kilometres per hour. It travels at 300,000 kilometres per second.
So now you have to imagine that you and your father are standing not 80, but 300,000 kilometres away from one another on a very, very long road.
Let’s say you both set off on a journey towards one another on a real beam of light.
Each light beam will be travelling towards the other at 600,000 kilometres per second relative to one another.
Therefore, you would pass each other in precisely half of one second flat. Right?
Wrong. Because the speed of light is not relative.
So it will still take a whole second to travel 300,000 kilometres even though each light beam is travelling at 300,000 kilometres per second towards one another.
Because nothing can travel faster than a beam of light, not even two beams of light relative to one another.
Although they are travelling towards each other at 300,000 kilometres per second, their speed, relative to one another, is still only 300,000 kilometres per second.
It makes no sense – it’s impossible – but it’s a proven fact. I don’t know why it’s true, and I don’t know why it means that time slows down as you go faster. I haven’t worked out the relationship between light and time, and perhaps I never will. But it’s something to do with time and space being flip sides of the same thing – which is why it’s called “space-time” – in the same way that matter and energy, and electricity and magnetism, are two sides of the same thing.
I don’t think I will ever be clever enough to understand how the universe works. It’s just too big, extraordinary and super-weird.
These were the random thoughts that were skittering like spilt marbles through my head as I was waiting to leave my house that morning. Other teenagers daydream about scoring a goal in the World Cup Final. I dream about the peculiarity of the universe. Which makes me peculiar too, no doubt.
I glanced up at the clock on the wall. Time, even if it is relative in Einstein’s physics, appears to be absolute in Hedgecombe-upon-Dray. No negotiation is possible.
I was late. I had been lost in my own little world for so long, I now had to run for the bus.
I got a fresh surprise when I ran out of the door towards the bus stop. There was a small figure with a curtain of hair and pink-rimmed spectacles standing there.
It was Susan Brown.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I had made my mind up by now that Susan Brown was in cahoots with Lloyd Archibald Turnbull. But really there was nothing I could bloody well do. Unless I wanted to miss the bus, I would have to go and stand at the bus stop with her.
She watched me meditatively as I approached. She fiddled with her glasses, then took them off for a moment, and then replaced them. It occurred to me once again that, glasses on or off, she was terribly pretty. Her face was so nice it seemed hard to believe that she could be friends with Lloyd Turnbull.
But my scientific training had enabled me to grasp the principle that reality is often not what it seems.
I looked down the road, desperately hoping for the bus to arrive. It was nowhere in sight.
I asked for Scotty to beam me up but, as usual, he did not oblige. So rather reluctantly, I went and stood about a metre away from Susan Brown.
We stood there in silence for several seconds. Then, eventually, she spoke.
“Are you angry with me, Strato Nyman?”
I mumbled that I wasn’t. This was not true. I was just too intimidated to speak my mind.
I hated being shy. I wondered if it was my personality, or if something was wrong with my biochemistry. It can happen. In the nineteenth century there was an illness called erethism, which hat-makers used to suffer from. It came from mercury poisoning, and it made you pathologically timid and lacking in self-confidence. Perhaps I was suffering from a modern version of erethism.
She studied my face through her spectacle lenses.
“Strato? You are – aren’t you? Why are you angry with me?”
Suddenly, without warning, I felt exhausted. My shoulders slumped. I realized, there and then, that I was worn out with the effort of being shy. Then my exhaustion was replaced by anger. Obviously, hearing my parents fight the night before had had a bigger effect on me than I had imagined. Something was bottled up inside me and I needed to let it out.
“Because you’re just another bloody liar!” I blurted.
I could hardly believe what I had just said.
Susan Brown took a step backwards. Then the words started to tumble out. I couldn’t stop myself.
“You pretend to be nice to me, and then you hang about with Lloyd Turnbull. Just like Turnbull pretends to be nice to me and then uses it against me. At least Dr Ojebande doesn’t pretend to like me. I don’t know what’s wrong with people down here in the countryside. Why are you so nasty? I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m sick of it. What is the matter with everyone? What is the matter with you, Susan Brown? Whose side are you on anyway?”
Just as suddenly as it had arrived, the anger dissipated, like smoke from a damped-down fire. I felt ashamed and embarrassed, but at the same time it was as if a weight had lifted from me.
Susan Brown was struck dumb. Her mouth hung open slightly. I looked down at the ground, already regretting that I had spoken out.
At that moment, the bus pulled up next to us. Th
e doors opened and I hurried inside.
Mr Maurice Bailey was grinning as usual.
“You alright, Robertson?”
I looked round to see who he was talking to, but there was only Susan Brown behind me. I ignored Mr Maurice Bailey and went and sat down on an empty two-person seat by myself.
I watched Susan Brown arguing with Mr Bailey about something or other. She seemed to be getting very frustrated, but Mr Bailey was just laughing. Eventually she made her way up the bus, her face red. To my surprise, she sat next to me.
“He shouldn’t have that job,” she said, nodding towards Mr Bailey.
I didn’t know what Susan Brown was talking about. Mr Bailey had always seemed perfectly nice to me, even if he did make weird comments.
She stared ahead of her. It seemed she was as angry as I had been. Then suddenly she turned to me.
“I don’t know how you could say all those bad things about me. I hate Lloyd Turnbull. I didn’t choose to sit next to him on Friday. Dr Ojebande sat him there because he thought it might make him behave better. There’s no reason for you to be nasty to me. I’ve never said anything bad to you, have I?”
Now she was looking at me. I could feel myself blushing.
“Well? Have I, Strato Nyman?”
Now that I thought about it, she hadn’t. Then I remembered Dr Ojebande talking about Lloyd Turnbull being “re-seated”.
Maybe she was telling the truth. Perhaps she was on my side, after all. But I was scared to trust her. So I didn’t say anything and we sat in silence.
Then, after a few more minutes had passed, she said – in a different kind of voice, softer and more friendly – “You’re very good at science, aren’t you?”
“I just like it a lot,” I replied, meek as a kitten again.
She nodded. Then – this was where the big surprise came – she said, “I like it too. It’s like magic, isn’t it? Real-life magic.”
Now I was flummoxed. I really wanted to believe she was not a secret agent for Lloyd Turnbull and the two Waynes but I still couldn’t be sure. I looked at her. Her face seemed soft and open.