by Ian Mcewan
I collected my book from Dillon’s and spent twenty minutes browsing. Because I was eager to start writing, I took a taxi home. As I turned away from paying off the driver, I saw Parry waiting for me outside the apartment building, right by the entrance. What was I expecting? That he would vanish because I was thinking about something else? He looked a little shamefaced as I approached, but he held his ground.
He began speaking while I was some distance off. “You said wait, so I waited.”
I had the keys in my hand. I hesitated. I wanted to tell him I had said no such thing and to remind him of his “solemn promise.” I wondered too if it might be to my advantage to hear him out again and discover more about his state of mind. But the prospect of being drawn into another domestic drama, this time on a narrow brick path between shaved clumps of privet, appalled me.
I showed him my key and said, “You’re in the way.”
He continued to block my view of the entrance. He said, “I want to talk about the accident.”
“Well, I don’t.” I took another two paces toward him, as though he were a ghost and I might slip the extended key right through him to the lock.
He was back to whining. “Look, Joe. We’ve got so much to talk about. I know it’s on your mind too. Why don’t we sit down together now and see what we can work out.”
I shouldered my way into him with a curt “Excuse me.” I was surprised that he melted at the touch. He was lighter than I had thought. He let himself be shoved to one side and I was able to open the door.
“The thing is,” he said, “I’m coming at this from the angle of forgiveness.”
I stepped inside, ready to block his attempt to follow me. But he remained where he was, and when I closed the door I saw him through the unbreakable glass mouthing a word at me that may have been forgiveness again. I took the lift up, and I had just arrived outside the apartment door when I heard the phone ring. I thought it might be Clarissa, calling in as she had promised. I hurried into the hallway and snatched up the receiver.
It was Parry. “Please don’t run from this, Joe,” he began.
I hung up and left the phone off the hook. Then I changed my mind and replaced it. I turned off the ring tone and set the answering machine. It clicked into action even as I was crossing the living room to the window. Parry was out there, across the street where he could be seen, and he had a mobile to his ear. I heard his voice on the monitor echo in the hall behind me. “Joe, God’s love will seek you out.” He looked up and must have glimpsed me before I stepped behind the curtain. “I know you’re there, I can see you. I know you’re listening.”
I went back to the hall and turned the monitor volume down. In the bathroom I splashed my face with cold water and looked in the mirror at my dripping features, wondering what it would be like to be obsessed by someone like me. This moment, as well as the one in the field when Clarissa handed me the bottle of wine, might serve as a starting point, for I think it was then that I really began to understand that this was not going to be over by the end of the day. As I went out into the hallway, back toward the answering machine, I thought, I’m in a relationship.
I raised the lid on the machine. The recording tape was still turning. I pushed the volume wheel up a notch and heard Parry’s voice faintly intoning, “… to walk away from it, Joe, but I love you. You’ve set this in motion. You can’t turn your back on it now …”
I walked quickly into my study, picked up the fax phone, and called the police. In the seconds before I was connected I realized that I had no idea what to say. A woman’s voice came on, laconic and skeptical, hardened against a workaday deluge of panic and woe.
I spoke in the gruff and reasoned tone of a responsible citizen. “I’d like to report a case of harassment, systematic harassment.” I was transferred to a man whose voice showed the same wary calm. I repeated my statement. There was only a fractional hesitation before the first question.
“Are you the person being harassed?”
“Yes. I’ve been—”
“And is the person causing the nuisance with you now?”
“He’s standing outside my place this very minute.”
“Has he inflicted any physical harm on you?”
“No, but he—”
“Has he threatened you with harm?”
“No.” I understood that my grievance would have to be poured into the available bureaucratic mold. There was no facility refined enough to process every private narrative. Denied the release of complaint, I tried to take comfort in having my story assimilated into a recognizable public form. Parry’s behavior had to be generalized into a crime.
“Has he made threats against your property?”
“No.”
“Or against third parties?”
“No.”
“Is he trying to blackmail you?”
“No.”
“Do you think you could prove that he intends to cause you distress?”
“Er, no.”
The voice slipped out of official neutrality into a near-genuine query. I thought I caught a Yorkshire accent. “Can you tell me what he’s doing, then?”
“He phones me at all hours. He talks to me in the—”
The voice was quick to move back to his default position, the interrogative flowchart. “Is he using obscene or insulting behavior?”
“No. Look, officer. Why don’t you let me explain? He’s a crank. He won’t let me alone.”
“Are you aware of what he actually wants?”
I paused. For the first time I was aware of other voices behind the man’s. Perhaps there were banks of police officers like him with headsets and, all day long, muggings, murders, suicides, knife-point rapes. I was in there with the rest: attempted daylight religious conversion.
I said, “He wants to save me.”
“Save you?”
“You know, convert me. He’s obsessed. He simply won’t leave me alone.”
The voice cut in, impatience taking hold at last. “I’m sorry, caller. This is not a police matter. Unless he harms you or your property or threatens the same, he’s committing no offense. Trying to convert you is not against the law.” Then he terminated our emergency conversation with his own little stricture. “We do have religious freedom in this country.”
I went back to the living room window and looked down at Parry. He was no longer talking to my machine. He stood there with his hands in his pockets facing the building, as stolid as a Stasi agent.
I made a flask of coffee and some sandwiches and retreated into my study, which faces out across another street, and sat there reading, or rather shuffling, my notes. My concentration was ruined. Being hounded by Parry was aggravating an older dissatisfaction. It comes back to me from time to time, usually when I’m unhappy about something else, that all the ideas I deal in are other people’s. I simply collate and digest their research and deliver it up to the general reader. People say I have a talent for clarity. I can spin a decent narrative out of the stumblings, backtrackings, and random successes that lie behind most scientific breakthroughs. It’s true, someone has to go between the researcher and the general public, giving the higherorder explanations that the average laboratory worker is too busy, or too cautious, to indulge. It’s also true I’ve made a lot of money swinging spider-monkey-style on the tallest trees of the science fashion jungle—dinosaurs, black holes, quantum magic, chaos, super-strings, neuroscience, Darwin revisited. Beautifully illustrated hardback books, with TV documentary spinoffs and radio discussion panels and conferences in the pleasantest places on the planet.
In my bad moments the thought returns that I’m a parasite and I probably would not feel this way if I did not have a good physics degree and a doctorate in quantum electrodynamics. I should have been out there myself, carrying my own atomic increment to the mountain of human knowledge. But when I left university I was restless after seven years’ disciplined study. I traveled, widely, recklessly, and for far too long. When I finally
got back to London, I went into business with a friend. The idea was to market a device, basically a cunningly phased set of circuits, that I had worked on in my spare time during my postgraduate days. This tiny item was supposed to enhance the performance of certain microprocessors, and the way it looked to us then, every computer in the world was going to need one. A German company flew us out to Hanover, first class, and for a couple of years we thought we were going to be billionaires. But the patent application failed. A team from a science park outside Edinburgh was there before us with better electronics. Then the computer industry stormed off in another direction anyway. Our company never even traded, and the Edinburgh people went bust. By the time I got back to quantum electrodynamics, the hole in my curriculum vitae was too big, my math was rusting up, and I was looking too old, in my late twenties, for this very competitive game.
When I emerged from my last interview, I already knew—by the emphatic kindness with which my old professor showed me out—that my academic career was sunk. I walked down Exhibition Road in the rain, wondering what to do. As I passed the Natural History Museum the rain became torrential, and with a few dozen other people I ran into the museum to shelter. I sat myself down by the full-scale model of the diplodocus, and as I dried out I fell into a strangely contented state of crowd-watching. Frequently, large groups provoke in me a vague misanthropy. This time, however, the curiosity and wonder I saw in people seemed to ennoble them. All who walked in, whatever their age, were drawn to come and stand and marvel at that magnificent beast. I overheard conversations, and what interested me, apart from the enthusiasm, was the general level of ignorance. I heard a ten-year-old boy ask the three grownups he was with whether a creature like this one would have chased and eaten people. It was clear from the ready answers he received that the adults’ evolutionary timetable was badly out of kilter.
As I sat there, I began to think through the few disparate things I myself knew about dinosaurs. I remembered Darwin’s account, in the Voyage of the Beagle, of finding large fossilized bones in South America, and how crucial to his theory was the question of their age. He had been impressed by the arguments put forward by the geologist Charles Lyell. The earth was a lot older than the four thousand years defended by the church. In our own time, the cold-blooded/warm-blooded contest was being settled in favor of the latter. There was new geological evidence of various cataclysms that had disturbed life on Earth. That vast crater in Mexico could well have been caused by the meteor that ended the dinosaurs’ empire and gave the little ratlike creatures that scuttled at the monsters’ feet the chance to expand their niche and so permit the mammals—and therefore ultimately the primates—to flourish. There was also an attractive idea around that the dinosaurs had not been exterminated at all. They had bowed to environmental necessity and evolved into the harmless birds we feed in our back gardens.
By the time I left the museum I had a scheme for a book scrawled on the back of my interview appointment letter. I did three months’ reading and six months’ writing. The sister of my failed business partner was a picture researcher who kindly agreed to defer her fee. The book came out at a time when no dinosaur book could fail, and mine did well enough for me to be signed up for black holes. My working life began, and as the successes rolled in, so all other possibilities in science closed down on me. I was a journalist, a commentator, an outsider to my own profession. I would never get back to those days, heady in retrospect, when I was doing original doctoral research on the magnetic field of the electron, when I attended conferences on the problem of infinities in the renormalizable theories—not as an observer but as an active, though minor, participant. Now no scientist, not even a lab technician or college porter, would ever take me seriously again.
On this particular day, in my study with my coffee and sandwiches, and my failure to make progress with the smile, and Parry standing guard on the pavement, it came back to me again how I had ended up with this. From time to time I heard the click of the answering machine engaging. Every hour or so I went into the living room to check, and he was always there, staring at the entrance like a dog tied up outside a shop. On only one occasion was he talking on the phone to me. Mostly he stood still, feet slightly apart, hands in pockets, the expression on his face, as far as I could tell, suggesting concentration, or perhaps imminent happiness.
When I looked out at five o’clock, he had gone. I lingered by the window, imagining that I could see his outline in vacated space, a pillar of absence glowing in the late afternoon’s diminishing light.
Then I went and stood by the machine. The red LED showed thirty-three messages. I used the scan function to skip through them and found Clarissa’s voice. She hoped I was all right, she’d be back at six, and she loved me. There were three work messages, leaving Parry’s score at twenty-nine. Even as I contemplated that figure, the tape began to turn. I pushed the volume wheel. It sounded like he was calling from a taxi. “Joe. Brilliant idea with the curtains. I got it straightaway? All I wanted to say is this again. I feel it too. I really do.” On these last words emotion pitched his voice a little higher.
The curtains? I returned to the living room and looked. They hung as they always did. We never drew them. I pulled one aside, foolishly expecting to find a clue.
Then I sat again in my study, not working but brooding and waiting for Clarissa, and again my thoughts returned to how I came to be what I was, and how it might have been different, and, ridiculously, how I might find my way back to original research and achieve something new before I was fifty.
Nine
It would make more sense of Clarissa’s return to tell it from her point of view. Or at least from that point as I later construed it. She arrives up three flights of stairs, bearing five kilograms of books and papers in her leather bag, which she has carried half a mile from the tube station. At her back, a bad day. First thing, the student she supervised yesterday, a raw girl from Lancaster, phoned her in tears and shouting incoherently. When Clarissa calmed her down, the girl accused her of setting her impossible reading tasks and of sending her up blind alleys of research. The Romantic poetry seminar went badly because the two students appointed to give discussion papers had prepared nothing and the rest of the kids had not bothered with the reading. At the end of the morning she discovered that her appointment diary was missing. All through lunch a colleague complained that her husband was too gentle with her in bed and lacked the necessary sexual aggression to overpower her and deliver the quality of orgasm she knew she deserved. For three hours during the afternoon Clarissa sat on a senate committee and found herself maneuvered into voting for the least bad option, a seven percent reduction in the budget of her own department. She went straight from that to a performance and efficiency interview conducted by the management, where she was reminded that she had been consistently late in filing her workload quota schedules and that her teaching, research, and administration ratios were showing an uneven distribution.
As she lugs her bag up the stairs, she feels it is costing her more effort than it should, and she thinks she might be getting a cold. There’s a tenderness over the bridge of her nose, and her eyes are pricking. There’s also a widening ache in the small of her back, always a reliable sign in her of viral infection. Worst of all, the memory of the balloon accident is back with her. It’s never been far from her mind, but for a good part of the day she has kept it at one remove, anecdotalized, in its own compartment. Now it has broken out, it is right inside her. It’s like a smell on the end of her fingers. The image that has been with her since the late afternoon is of Logan letting go. The feeling that went with it, the horrified helplessness, has been with her too and seems to have generated the physical symptoms of a cold or flu. Talking the events over with friends no longer seems to help, because, she thinks, she has reached a core of senselessness. As she comes up the last flight of stairs, she notes that the ache is spreading to her knee joints. Or is this what happens to you when you haul books upstairs and you are
no longer in your twenties? As she puts the key in the front door, she experiences a little lift of the spirits when she remembers that Joe will be home and is always good at looking after her when she needs it.
When she steps into the hall, he is waiting for her by the door of his study. He has a wild look about him that she has not seen in some time. She associates this look with overambitious schemes, excited and usually stupid plans that very occasionally afflict the calm, organized man she loves. He’s coming toward her, talking before she’s even through the door. Without a kiss or any form of greeting, he’s off on a tale of harassment and idiocy behind which there appears to be some kind of accusation, perhaps even anger against her, for she was quite wrong, he says, but now he is vindicated. Before she can ask him what he’s talking about, in fact before she has even put down her bag, he is on another tack, telling her about a conversation he’s just had with an old friend in the Particle Physics Unit on Gloucester Road, and how he thinks that this friend there might wangle him an appointment with the professor. All Clarissa wants to say is Where’s my kiss? Hug me! Take care of me! But Joe is pressing on like a man who has seen no other human for a year.