by Unknown
‘No, Ma, no! I haven’t seen you for half a year, with only your voice on tapes. Where have you been and what have you been doing? Tell her, Da!’
‘John Cullin, did you teach our son to answer back to his elders and betters?’
‘You just have to wait until it passes. Anyway, I’m only the father. Tea?’
Liam sniffed. ‘Please.’
Planck was still running around in nervous wagging circles.
In my first week in Hong Kong, I did very little. I got lost and unlost and lost in byways and overways and underways. A quarter of the world, teeming in a few square miles. Huw was right. If I avoided computer link-ups I was probably untraceable. But after Switzerland I felt I had crash-landed on a strange planet where privacy and peace were coincidences rather than rights. ‘Dispense with the niceties,’ advised Huw, ‘and learn to do inside your head what you can’t do outside.’
I got a fake British passport made, for only fifty US dollars.
I watched the television war. I watched the weaponry analysed, hyped and billed: Scud versus Homer, Batman versus the Joker. The war had been ‘won’ days before, the supply of cheap oil secured, but that was no longer the point. Technology efficacy needed to be tested in combat conditions, and to use up stockpiles. The wretched army of conscripts from the enemy’s ethnic minorities were the laboratory rats. Quancog’s laboratory rats. My laboratory rats.
I recorded a tape of me and Hong Kong, and posted it to John, via Siobhan in Cork, John’s Aunt Triona in Baltimore, Billy, Father Wally and thus to John. I prayed it would get through undetected, a snail invisible to radar.
Huw was suddenly dispatched to Petersburg, so there I was: alone, unknown, unemployed, a box of hundred-dollar notes concealed in the freezer compartment under bags of peas. My escape plan had worked too well. No kidnapper from phantom crime networks so much as dropped in for a chat. Had the Texan just been bluffing? Trying to scare me to Saragosa?
Now what?
We create models to explain nature, but the models wind up gatecrashing nature and driving away the original inhabitants. In my lecturing days most of my students believed that atoms really are solid little stellar nuclei orbited by electrons. When I tell them that nobody knows what an electron is, they look at me like I’ve told them that the sun is a watermelon. One of the better read-up ones might put up their hand and say, ‘But Dr Muntervary, isn’t an electron a charged probability wave?’
‘Suppose now,’ I am fond of saying, ‘I prefer to think of it as a dance.’
Forty summers ago, two miles away from Aodhagan Croft. There is a chink in the floorboards in the upstairs room of the house in the sycamores. After I’ve been put to bed, I sometimes pull back the rug and look down into the parlour. My ma wears her white dress and her cultured pearls, and Da a black shirt. On the gramophone revolves a new 78 rpm from Dublin.
‘No no no, Jack Muntervary,’ Ma scolds, ‘you’ve got two left feet. Elephant ones.’
‘Chinatown, my Chinatown,’ crackles the gramophone.
‘Try again.’
Their shadows dance on the walls.
What now, indeed?
I was still a physicist, even if nobody knew it but me. The idea crept up and announced itself while I was haggling down the price of grapefruits in the market. Pink grapefruits pink as dawn. Strip quantum cognition down to first principles, and rebuild it incorporating nonlocality, instead of trying to lock nonlocality out. Before I’d paid for the grapefruits, ideas for formulae were kicking down the door. I bought a leather-bound black notebook from a stationer’s, sat down next to a stone dragon and scribbled eight pages of calculations, before I spilt them and lost them.
In the days and weeks following my routine grew saggier but regular. I got up around one in the afternoon and ate at a dim sung restaurant across the alleyway. The place was owned by an old albino man. I sat in the corner with The Economist, Legal Advisor, a Delia Smith cookery book, or whatever else was lying around Huw’s apartment. On lucky days the shoeshiner who was the de facto postman for our tenement had a jiffy bag addressed to Huw with a tape from John. I listened to them in my dim sung corner on Huw’s Walkman, over and over. Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he’d just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there would be some Liam. The summer fayre. The Fastnet Race. I would unfold my map of Clear Island. Those tapes prised the lid off homesickness and rattled out the contents, but always at the bottom was solace.
At the end of the afternoon I sat down at the rickety desk and picked up from where I had left off in the early hours. I worked in isolation: e-mailing any of the handful of people alive who could have contributed was too dangerous. It was liberating: not having to be accountable to Heinz Formaggio and other cretins. I had my father’s fountain pen, my black book, a box of CDs containing data from every particle lab experiment ever conducted, and thousands of dollars of computer equipment bought from a Sikh gentleman more resourceful than Light Box Procurement. Compared to Kepler, who plotted the ellipsoids of Mars with little more than a goose quill, I had it easy.
There were wrong turnings. I had to jettison matrix mechanics in favour of virtual numbers, and my doomed attempt to amalgamate the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox with Cadwalladr’s behavioural model set me back weeks. It was the loneliest time in my life. As chess players or writers or mystics know, the pursuit of insight takes you deep into the forest. Days were I’d just gaze at the steam rising from my coffee, or stains on the wall, or a locked door. Days were I’d find the next key in the steam or the stains or the lock.
By July all the footprints of Einstein, Bohr and Sonada were behind me.
The black book was filling up.
I was still talking. Liam’s toast had gone cold. A helicopter flew over.
What is Liam thinking?
Is it, ‘Why can’t I have normal parents?’
Is it, ‘Will she never stop?’
‘Is my ma a madwoman?’
It makes me sad that I can’t read my son’s thoughts. There again, it’s right this way. He’s eighteen, now. I missed his birthday again. Where will I be for the next one?
‘Well don’t stop there, Ma. You’re just getting to the good bit.’
The strong force that stops the protons of a nucleus hurtling away from one another; the weak force that keeps the electrons from crashing into the protons; electromagnetism, which lights the planet and cooks dinner; and gravity, which is the most down to Earth. From before the time the universe was the size of a walnut to its present diameter, these four forces have been the statute book of matter, be it the core of Sirius or the electrochemical ducts of the brains of students in the lecture theatre at Belfast. Bored, intent, asleep, dreaming, in receding tiers. Chewing pencils or following me.
Matter is thought, and thought is matter. Nothing exists that cannot be synthesised.
Summer. Huw came back late most nights, to snatch a few hours of sleep before returning to his office. A securities firm had crashed, and the effects were rippling out. Sometimes a week went by and apart from noticing the toothpaste tube depleting we were barely aware of one another. On Sundays, however, we always dressed up and went out to dinner somewhere expensive, but low-key. I didn’t want to risk meeting his colleagues. Lying is a skill I have never mastered.
I often worked all night. Hong Kong never really quietens down, the sunlight just switches off for a few hours. Huw’s snores, the godalmighty clatter of Kowloon’s sweat shops, that gigantic bicycle pump, the eye of the electric fan and moth wings on the computer screen ushered in the quantum mathematics of sentience.
Three sharp knocks on John’s door and a mantrap snapped shut, I’d jumped up, spilt my tea and was crouched in the stair doorway, poised to run – where? Only one door – I would have to jump from the second floor and run for it across the meadows. Great idea, Mo. Dislocate a hip. Liam didn’t know what
was going on. John was working it out, my panic bashing its head on his defences.
‘It’s okay, Ma—’ Liam began.
I sliced the air. ‘Sssssh!’
Liam showed me the palms of his hands like he was calming a scared animal. ‘It’s either Father Wally, Maisie or Red come to milk Feynman . . .’
I shook my head. They’d have knocked once, if at all, and walked in.
‘Who was on the St Fachtna with you this morning? Any Americans?’
There was another rattle of knocking. ‘Hello?’ A woman. Not Irish, not English.
I put my finger over my lips, and tiptoed up the stairs. They creaked.
A mouth to the letterbox. ‘G’day? Anyone home?’
‘Morning to you,’ said John. ‘Just a moment . . .’
I slid into the bedroom and looked for somewhere to hide the black book. Where, Mo? Under the mattress? Eat it?
I heard John opening the door. ‘Sorry to keep you.’
‘No worries. Sorry for the bother. I’m walking to this row of stones on the map here. Map-reading was never my strong point.’
‘The stone row? Piece of cake. Go back down the drive, turn left, and just follow the sign to Roe’s bridge. All the way until the road peters out. Then you’ll see it. Unless the mist has other plans.’
‘Thanks a million. Too bad about this rain, eh? It’s like winter back home.’
How can John be so calm? ‘Where is home? New Zealand?’
‘That’s right! Halfmoon Bay, Stewart Island, south of the South Island. Know it?’
‘Can’t say I do. ’Fraid the weather’s a law unto itself, here. Tropical rainstorms, raining frogs . . . Gales later though, the fishing forecast said earlier. Winter’s around the corner.’
‘Just my luck. Say now, you’re a lovely dog! A him or a her?’
‘A her. Planck.’
‘As in thick as a?’
‘As in the physicist who discovered why you can sit in front of a fire and not be incinerated by the ultraviolet catastrophe.’
Nervous laugh. ‘Oh, right, that Planck. Mild-mannered beastie for an island dog.’
‘It’s her job. She’s my guide dog.’
The usual awkwardness. I relaxed. A pursuer would know about John. Unless she was just a good actress. I tensed up.
‘You mean, er, you’re . . .’
‘. . . as a bat. A lot blinder than a bat, actually. I’m unequipped with sonar.’
‘Strewth . . . there was I . . . I’m sorry.’
‘No need.’
‘Well, I’d better get to the row of stones before the gales blow ’em over.’
‘Take your time. They’ve been there three thousand years. Mind how you go.’
‘’Bye. Thanks again.’
I watched her walk down the drive. A youngish woman with red hair and a lemon raincoat. She looked over her shoulder, and I pulled away from the window. Could she have noticed the third coffee cup? I heard Liam and John talking in hushed voices downstairs. I watched the mist drifting in from the Calf Islands.
The sky over the Mount Gabriel was beaten dark and threatening. Liam and I were making a stew with some late turnips from the garden. John was tuning his harp. The stew bubbled in the pot.
Liam crumbled in a stock cube. ‘What are you going to do, Ma?’
‘Add some more garlic.’
‘You know what I’m talking about. Are they coming for you?’
‘Aye, I think they are.’
‘And are you going to go with them?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why did you come back to Clear if you know they’ll track you here?’
‘Because I needed to see you pair.’
‘You need a plan.’
‘By all means I need a plan.’
‘So, what are your options?’
Liam sounded like my father. ‘One. Burn the black book and turn quantum cognition to ash. Change my name to Scarlett O’Hara, plant beans, keep bees for the rest of my life, and hope that the CIA is too stupid to look for me on the island of my birth. Two. Spend the rest of my life backpacking in hot countries, wearing sandals and tie-dye trousers. Three. Go and live in a place in Texas that is not on maps, earn vast prestige and money by accelerating the new arms race fifty years, and see my son and my husband only under escort to ensure I don’t defect.’
Liam chopped his onion deftly. ‘Aye, that’s a thorny one.’
Kowloon brewed, stewed and simmered. My nonlocality virtual equations were holding. My peaceful gone-to-earth exile’s life couldn’t last.
I remember the moment it ended. A gecko had appeared on the screen. Its tongue flickered like electricity. Hello, tiny life-form of star compost, did you know that your lizardly life, too, is billiarded this way and that by quantum scissors, papers and stones? That your particles exist in a time-froth of little bridges and holes forever going back and around and under itself ? That the universe is the shape of a doughnut, and that if you had a powerful enough telescope you would see the tip of your tail?
Do you care?
Male shouting flared up from nowhere, and exploded in seesawing Cantonese. Women pitched in a couple of octaves higher. Tipped-over furniture walloped. The lampshade in my room swayed.
‘What the fuck was that?’ Huw stumbled through in his Daffy Duck boxer shorts and Mr Mole glasses, tripping over his Indonesian drum kit. ‘Fuck.’
A gun fired! I jumped as if it had gone off in my pocket. ‘Sweet Jesus!’
The whole building was quiet as death.
Huw checked that the bolts and chain were securely fastened.
The gecko was long gone.
A sickening sense that this was coming for me. I was gnawing my knuckles.
Thunder fell headlong down the stairs – and stopped. There were at least three sets of footfalls. Huw picked up a baseball bat. I picked up a scale plaster model of John Coltrane, and with utter calmness I knew that I had never been this petrified in all my life. Very luckily for us, the thunder carried on down. Huw went towards the window but I instinctively pulled him back. His eyes were astonished. ‘Fuck,’ he said, a third time. The only three swear words I’d ever heard from Huw.
The wart on my thumb was growing.
The phone rang. Leave me alone. Leave me alone.
John was nearest. ‘Hello?’
My throat was dry.
‘Tamlin . . .’
Tamlin Sheehy. Calm down, Mo. No newcomers to Clear Island today.
‘Yes, Liam tied the tarpaulin down. They’ll be fine. Thanks for asking. She would, would she? Okay . . . Mind how you go . . .’
John cupped the receiver. ‘Hey loverboy, Bernadette wants to murmur sweet nothings.’
‘Da! She’s frightmare! Don’t you dare!’
‘Don’t be rotten. You’ve got the lure of the exotic. You’ve been to Switzerland.’
John smiled twistedly and spoke back into the receiver. ‘Just a mo there, Bernadette, he’s just coming. He was in the shower. He’s just towelling himself dry for . . .’
Liam half-snarled, half-hissed, and took the phone into the hallway, shutting the door on the cord.
We listened to the radio over dinner.
‘Have you noticed,’ said John, ‘how countries call theirs “sovereign nuclear deterrents”, but call the other countries’ ones “weapons of mass destruction”?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
The wind rose and fell like mountains at sea. The glass rattled. Liam yawned, so did I. ‘One game to me, one game to you. Will Feynman be okay?’
‘He will. He huddles down behind his boulder. Where’s your da?’
‘In his study, meditating.’
Liam started putting away the Scrabble. ‘It’s going to be a harsh winter, Maisie was telling me. Long-range weather forecast.’
‘Maisie? Has she got satellite TV installed?’
‘No, her bees told her.’
‘Ah, the bees.’
The Chinese police
man was unexpectedly tall and civil. A lieutenant from the old Prince of Wales guard, he knew about Huw’s work. He wrote down our versions of the raid in his note book, and sipped iced tea. An ink-devil of sweat soaked itself into his shirt.
‘I should tell you that the burglars wanted to know where were hidden the gwai los. Your neighbours said there no gwai los.’
‘Before or after the gun was fired?’ I asked.
‘After. They lied for you.’
Huw puffed out his cheeks. ‘What are you thinking, Officer?’
‘Two possibilities. One. They thought the apartment of gwai los had better things to steal. Two. Mr Llewellyn, you investigating the accounts of powerful companies. Might they include some Triad links?’
‘Show me a company in Hong Kong that doesn’t have Triad links.’
‘Foreigners don’t live in neighbourhoods like this, especially white ones. Discovery Bay is more secure.’
I went into the kitchenette. In the opposite tenement the blinds were rolling down as the excitement subsided. Eyes everywhere. Eyes, eyes.
I remembered my conversation with the Texan. I knew who the ‘burglars’ were and what they had come for. Next time they wouldn’t mistake the British, American and Chinese system of labelling floors.
I hadn’t touched a piano since Switzerland. I played a passable aria from the Goldberg Variations.
Liam played a gorgeous ‘In a Sentimental Mood’.
John half-improvised, half-remembered. ‘This one’s the crow on the wall . . . this one’s the wind turbine . . . this one’s . . .’
‘Totally random notes?’ suggested Liam.
‘No. It’s the music of chance.’
‘The wind’s really getting up! Maybe there’ll be no boats tomorrow either, Ma?’
‘Maybe so. So tell me about Uni, Liam.’
‘They’ve got some cool electron microscopes. I’m doing my first-year thesis on superliquids, and I’ve been playing synths in a band, and—’