by Alex Marks
Friday, 3 April 2015. 05:52
Just before dawn I surfaced enough from a heavy, alcohol-fuelled sleep to dream. In the dream, which seemed no different to being awake, Sarah came into my exile bedroom, smiling, relaxed, vibrating with life. Her hair was down and was tousled round her head as if she'd just woken up. She was humming 'Summertime', which she always said made her
feel horny.
'Hello, sweetheart,' she said, 'fish are jumping...' I laid impassively in the narrow bed, watching as she slipped off her negligee and crawled in on top of me. '...and the weather is fine...' Her breath was hot on my body as she slowly worked her way down, looking up under her hair at me for a second with a sexy smile and I realised with a horrible start that this wasn't Sarah, this was somebody else...
I woke with a jump and almost fell out of bed, my arm thrashing at my dream, and with a massive hard on. I slumped back, finding the pillow wet with sweat, and put my hand over my eyes.
After all that it took me a long time to get going in the morning. I couldn't shake the feeling from the dream, that Sarah wasn't Sarah, that she was alive somewhere, that she'd been in the room with me. I showered and dressed, and made it downstairs, drawing the kitchen curtains to reveal a grey sky which leaned down on me from outside the window. I put the kettle on and automatically reached down two coffee mugs from the shelf. Seeing what I had done, I turned and left the room.
I started vaguely getting ready for work, but was interrupted by the crunching footsteps of the postman as he advanced up the drive. I picked up the scatter of letters and circulars and with a sinking feeling saw that several were addressed to Sarah. I supposed I ought to reply to the catalogues and charities and whoever to say could they please remove her from their mailing lists. I had kept putting off that delightful chore, and discovered that today my motivation was no higher for ringing impersonal, professionally-cheerful customer service representatives to inform them that my wife would no longer be ordering from their company because she was, in fact, dead.
Eventually I got into the car, and headed towards town. The Ford was so old that it still had a tape player in the dashboard, so I'd brought the mix tape with me and now slotted it in. I relived those first few anxious seconds where the tape might get chewed, but they passed, and then the sounds of Flat Beat by Mr Oizo filled the interior. What had I been thinking? It was amazing Sarah had gone out with me after this. Shaking my head, I pressed FFWD and then tried again. This time it was Blondie's Heart of Glass.
Debbie Harry serenaded me all the way into town. Oxford is lovely in the Spring, and I was half aware of the new green leaves on the plane trees in South Parks Road as I drove back to the lab. The sun had burnt off the light rain of earlier and tourists were wandering along the still-damp pavements with their typical aimless gait, and the animal rights protestors were starting to bake in the brightening sunshine as they mounted their continual protest outside the Biology building.
Once I had a love and it was divine
Soon found out I was losing my mind
You got that right, I thought, as I turned into the Cockcroft car park. There were no cars, and the bike racks were quite empty – it was out of Term, and it looked as if many of my colleagues were more interested in punting than physics today. One step onto the lab corridor, however, and Dave shuffled out of his office to see who was coming. Dave never seemed to go home, and I wasn’t surprised to find him here even when everyone else had skived off.
‘Alright, Dave? How’s it going?’ I tried to remember what I normally behaved like. Do I usually smile? ‘Did you get the time on the mass spectrometer?’ I managed to ask.
Dave smiled and mooched beside me down the corridor towards my lab and the gents, apparently not noticing I was massively faking it. ‘Yeah, all set up for next week. I’m just working out the protocols now.’ He grinned and paused half through the toilet door, ‘By the way, arsehole alert: Gilbert is on the prowl again for some juicy news before he’s off on his Easter holidays, so if I were you I’d start falsifying
results quick’.
I snorted and he bashed through the doorway and out of sight. Still, he had a point: Gilbert had sent back a very impatient reply to my email of late yesterday, explaining I was systematically examining element 122 for all manner of electromagnetic peculiarities. But whether he thought it was a time waster or not, it needed to be done and had thrown up a couple of very odd results that I had been keeping to myself while I re-ran and re-checked everything. I let myself into my lab and prudently locked the door behind me to stymie my boss from just breezing in. Beautiful day or not, Bill Gilbert was known to dislike his wife and children and preferred to come to work rather than be at home with them. Prior to his obligatory Spring holiday in Florida he would be hanging around the building somewhere, just waiting to take his bad mood out on somebody. Well, this morning I was determined that it wouldn't be me. I threw myself down on my creaky chair, fed the hamster, put the kettle on and fired up the PC.
What had been puzzling me was the reaction of element 122 to strong electromagnetic fields – even the new tests with the borrowed equipment showed that strange blank in the measurements. Interestingly, the duration of the blank was directly proportional to the frequency of the magnetic field acting on the element. The whole point of re-running the tests had been to rule out experimental error, but looking at the results on the screen now, the same mystery blip was front and centre.
I sat down at the keyboard and typed out a quick email to Levi, my contact at Harvard.
Levi
Thanks for giving me a couple of weeks' grace with the 122. I've just started the analysis and am getting strange effects at low mag fields. Are you seeing the same with your sample? Duration of recording error seems prop to field used.
Under pressure here to write up internal report so would be happy to pool results with you.
Adam
Maybe Levi would yield some data that I could cite in my paper for Gilbert, seeing he wasn't interested in my own results. Despite it being 2am in Boston I got an immediate reply:
Adam
All very sorry to hear your news. Are you ok? Come to Boston and we will get drunk together.
Fucking 122 is batshit. Keep reading data missing at low mag fields. Have checked all equipment and is fine. Is this what you are getting too?
Attached see our data. Hope you are making sense of this.
Levi
I smiled at Levi's characteristic email. Did he ever leave his lab? Maybe I should go to Boston, just chuck everything here and start again. We'd always talked about moving abroad but it had never... I swallowed and pushed the thought away, scanning quickly through Levi's attached data instead. Like he'd said, the readings all skipped at low field strengths. I pulled up my own two sets of results and overlaid them: identical. Whatever the hell was happening with this bloody mineral was happening in a predictable and measurable way, if that was any consolation. It wasn't. I typed a short reply.
Thanks Levi
All looks the same here, very weird. Let's definitely meet up and get pissed. Any chance of moving my research to your lab? Wanting to get out of Oxford.
Cheers, A
I sat back and looked out of the window. South Parks Road looked soft and warm in the sunshine, but despite this the idea of leaving Oxford for good and starting again was feeling very right. I wondered if Fergus would like America. My computer pinged.
Adam
I hate 122!!! See you in Connelly's Bar ASAP. Will speak to Erica about transfer, would be great to have you working
with us.
Laters
I worked all day in my lab, re-checking and verifying results, and roughly putting together a very basic report for my irritating boss. I was hoping that giving him something would get him off my back for a while, although I admitted that was probably unlikely. I'd just emailed him my report and the combined sets of results from me and Boston when my phone rang. The caller display said Kate
, Sarah's boss from the homelessness charity.
'Hello, Adam? How are you?'
'Hey, Kate, I'm ok.'
'Listen,' she sounded awkward, 'are you in Oxford? Could we maybe meet for a quick drink? I'm at the Kings Arms.'
The Kings Arms was about a five minute walk from my lab. I couldn't think why she'd want to meet in person, but sod it, I didn't have anything else to do, did I?
'Yeah, see you there in a bit.'
Early evening was dropping softly over the city as I left the lab and walked down to the pub. It's usually a magnet for students and tourists, sitting as it does just opposite the Bodleian library at the top of Broad Street, but this Friday night was out of term and too soon for the tourist season, so it was pleasantly quiet.
I got a pint at the bar and found Kate easily, a small, middle aged woman in non-descript skirt and cardigan, sitting on the padded bench-seat in the Wadham Room – a book-lined space overlooking the golden wall of the new Weston Library.
'Hi!' she got up and we awkwardly embraced for a second. I knew that Sarah had been fond of her, and she'd come round to dinner a couple of times, but I didn't know her well. She always seemed the typical Oxford blue-stocking to me: earnest and slightly posh. Tonight, though, she seemed nervous, her glass of house red already half empty. I took a long sip of my beer.
'How are you, Adam?' she asked, then shook her head, angrily. 'Sorry, stupid bloody question.'
'Don't worry about it,' I smiled, trying to set her at her ease. 'I'm ok. Everything is... ok. How are things at Homes For All?'
She shrugged, 'Same as. No funding, no interest from the council.' Another pull on her wine, which nearly finished it. 'But hey ho, we knew what we were getting into, trying to get affordable housing for care-leavers in one of the most expensive places in the country!' She smiled wryly, twirling her wine glass back and forth in her fingers.
'Refill?'
'Why not, anything red. Thanks.'
While I was waiting at the bar I tried to figure out why Kate was so jumpy. Was it just natural awkwardness at meeting the Grieving Widower? I couldn't tell. I was starting to feel the night's familiar crushing pointlessness creeping up on me. I didn't get myself another pint; I just wanted to get this over with and go home.
I placed the glass of red wine onto the table in front of Kate, and slipped back into my seat. Beside my almost full pint now sat a brightly patterned paper carrier bag, the sort of thing people give birthday presents in when they can't be arsed to wrap them up.
'What's this?'
'Sorry about the bag, it's all I could find.' Kate took another glug of wine. 'It's all Sarah's things, you know, from the office. I was hanging onto them until... Anyway, we've got a new volunteer starting next week and so I had to...'
I felt the black cloud above my head deepen. 'Ok, not a problem,' I heard myself saying, 'thanks for bringing them.' Quickly, as if the bag was radioactive, I swung it off the table and onto the bench next to me, out of my eye line.
Kate's mood did not seem to improve now the unpleasant task of handing over Sarah's note books and pens was finished. She swirled her glass, sloshing red wine up the side and splashing it on the table.
'What's up?' I just wanted this to be over now. The lights from the huge art deco chandelier which hung, incongruously, in the room seemed horribly bright and the beer tasted sour in my mouth. I wondered vaguely whether I was getting a migraine, or whether I was just fucking pissed off to the point of bodily shut down.
Kate grimaced and sat up, looking me in the eye. She took a breath and visibly steeled herself. 'She phoned me, you know, the night – of the accident.' I hadn't known this. 'You were abroad, I know, and I think she just wanted somebody to talk to.'
Her eyes slid down to the table, and she began dabbing her finger in the small puddle of red wine that had slopped out of her glass. I said nothing.
'She was horribly upset, really sobbing.' She swallowed. 'I tried to get her to come to mine and say what it was all about but she said she couldn't
tell me.'
Kate sat up and knocked back the remaining wine in her glass. 'I feel so guilty, Adam, that I didn't say I would go and meet her or something. She drove home so upset, I can't help but think...' I suddenly realised that she was crying, tears pouring unheeded down her cheeks and dripping onto the table. Without saying anything I reached over and put my hands over hers, stilling their repetitive dab dabbing. She grasped them, hard, and then almost flung them away from her.
'I just wanted to say how sorry I am.' A hanky appeared from somewhere and I tactfully looked into my beer while she tidied herself up. After a minute I risked a glance over and saw her gathering her bag and bits and pieces.
'It's ok, Kate, really it's ok. I feel guilty too. If I hadn't been at that conference, if I'd heard my phone...' I took a breath. 'It's not anybody's fault. It's not your fault.'
She looked over at me, tears still leaking out of her eyes. She briskly knocked them away with the handkerchief and then nodded. 'I know, I do know, really. But I wanted to tell you. I hope that, well, I hope that we can still be friends, anyway, after all this. People often drift away when – there's been a bereavement, and I didn't want us to drift away too. Sarah meant a huge amount to me, and, well, she was your wife, and I'd like to think that perhaps we could meet up once in a while just to remember her.' She stood up, then I saw something flash across her face.
'What is it?'
She hovered, looking uncomfortable. 'It's nothing, well, you might get someone from the charity contacting you.' Seeing my blank expression, she went on: 'A client, I mean, Susie Roper. She's been telling me all week that she knows that Sarah was, well, murdered, and she knows why.'
My body seemed to go cold all over. 'Murdered? What? What does she mean?'
Kate half smiled. 'Oh, it's really nothing, Adam, I wouldn't have mentioned it at all except that she's becoming quite fixated and she might try to come to see you.' She smiled, then, rather patronisingly, 'Susie's had a lot of problems, substance misuse, mental health, all the rest of it, so I wouldn't put any store in anything she says.' She hoisted her bag again, moving away and not giving me a chance to reply, thankfully. 'Take care, Adam.'
As she walked out of the pub I sat back and wondered whether this Susie really could – or should – be discounted as easily as that, just because she'd had some difficulties. Wasn't that how people overlooked terrible crimes and abuses, because the witnesses all 'had problems'? I ran my hand through my hair. But on the other hand, what could she know? Sarah's death was an accident. The coroner and the engines of the state had pronounced it thus, I thought, with a bitter smile.
I walked slowly back up the road to the lab, birthday bag in hand. I couldn't face taking Sarah's things home, so dropped them into my office, and then returned to the car park. I unlocked my old Ford, and then leaned against the car and tried to calm down. Sarah had been upset, then, when she'd left her parents' house. For all they'd tried to play it down, I had always suspected as much, and now Kate had confirmed it. And she'd felt guilty at letting Sarah drive! It was fucking Richard and Maggie who
were to blame, not –
'Ah! Adam!' I was snapped out of this angry reverie by the voice of Freddy Wright, calling with his usual arrogance across the quiet of the empty car park. It was fully dark now, and it took a few seconds before he moved into the circle of light from one of the streetlamps and his wide, soft face caught up with his public school boy voice. 'Wool gathering?'
I had very little time generally for Freddy, and even less at the moment. He'd ridden into his plum position on the back of the PhD he'd completed at the lab where some excellent work had been done on General Relativity... just none of it by him. Oh, and by shamelessly exploiting his links to his Uncle, the head of department. Posh, entitled and lazy, he got under my skin just by existing.
'Just thinking, Frederick,' I said, opening the driver's side door, 'you might want to try it sometime.' I sat down and turn
ed the engine over. To my amazement, the moron came right up to the car and banged his knuckles on the window. Shaking my head, I wound it down a bit. 'What is it? Fuck off, will you? I'm going home.'
'Why don't you take some more time off?' he suggested, in a facsimile of kindness, almost leaning through the window, 'you're not really yourself, are you? Everyone knows you should give that unbibium sample to a more – qualified researcher.'
'Everyone knows this, do they?' I wanted to press the window button and squash his long nose in the gap. 'Goodness, how I tremble.'
He must have seen my finger twitch towards the button because he straightened up suddenly, taking his nose out of the danger zone.
'Think about it, Adam!' he called, irritatingly unflustered. 'We can help you!'
'Oh, just piss off, Freddy,' was as much as I could find to reply, and stamped on the accelerator, making him jump back. I looked in the mirror, and he was just standing in the middle of the car park, smiling to himself. After a second I turned onto the main road and he was lost to view.
chapter three
Saturday, 4 April 2015. 11:11
In the morning I overslept, the first proper sleep I'd had in ages. It was such a beautiful Spring morning that I decided to skip the lab for once, and go out for a run instead. I rummaged out some jogging bottoms and my old trainers and took off down the lanes around the cottage.
I was on my way back up to the house, ninety fairly agonising minutes later, when I was spotted by my elderly neighbour, Max. He waved from his front garden so I felt obliged to stop for a second.
'Hello, Max. How are you?'