by Joe Heap
‘Yeah, so?’
‘So, that thing doesn’t look very theoretical.’
She can’t see Rebecca’s face in the half-light, but she can hear the smile in her voice.
‘Don’t worry – I may be a bumbling theoretician, but I can do some stuff for myself. This is just a toy that they keep here to impress the undergrads.’
‘And that’s what we’re doing, is it? Impressing the undergrads? Or one undergrad in particular?’
‘Oh, shut up and let me concentrate.’
Rebecca flips a switch and a rumbling hum starts from the machinery. An involuntary shudder runs down Nova’s spine, like when the hairdresser gets too close with the clippers.
‘Oh, I forgot – here.’ Rebecca hands her something made from clear plastic that Nova can’t understand without touch.
‘Goggles?’
‘Yeah, put them on.’
‘Why do I need to?’ The shudder returns as the hum goes up a tone.
‘Calm down. I’m just pumping the air out of the chamber, so there’s a veeery small chance of implosion. We wouldn’t want to hurt your lovely eyes, when you’ve only just learned to use them, would we?’
Nova doesn’t respond, just fumbles the goggles onto her face and grits her teeth.
‘What is this thing?’
‘This, my lovely little supernova, is a Farnsworth-Hirsch nuclear fusor.’
‘Nuclear? You’re operating a nuclear reactor?’
‘A nuclear fusor – there’s no fissile material in there.’ Rebecca turns a red tap on a gas tank, and a low hiss adds to the rumble of the compressor.
‘Well, don’t I feel safe. No plutonium!’ Nova folds her arms over her chest, protectively.
‘Oh, hush – you’re fine.’ Rebecca taps a pressure gauge, checks several things that Nova can’t see, and nods. ‘Okay, I’m going to turn on the power – you just look through this little window, right?’
She points through the glass of a round hatch in the body of the machine, which Nova hadn’t noticed before. It is heavily riveted, like the porthole of a rocket ship. There is nothing to see through the glass – the inside of the machine is black. Rebecca flips a switch, then turns a dial very slowly, watching the gauges.
‘What am I supposed to …’ Nova starts, then trails off. She can see something inside the machine. It’s only faint at first, but the shape is there – three rings, arranged to form a globe, like an unusual lightbulb filament. But it’s not the filament that’s glowing. Held loosely inside the rings is a faint, purplish glow.
‘Is it working yet?’ Rebecca peers her head around to look through the porthole. ‘Ah, there we go! Warming up.’
‘What … what is it? What’s it doing?’ Nova feels transfixed by the glow, which grows in intensity as Rebecca turns up the voltage.
‘Well, first I got rid of all the unwanted atmosphere in the chamber,’ Rebecca says, talking like a stage magician, ‘then I introduced a thin stream of deuterium atoms, which in the near-vacuum can move very very very quickly. Then I turned on the power, trapping them in the middle there and smoooshing them together.’
She grabs Nova with one arm and squeezes her close.
‘Okay, but what’s that glow?’
‘That’s what you get when you push atoms together really hard – nuclear fusion.’
Nova watches, entranced, as the purple haze grows in intensity.
‘It’s beautiful … but why are you showing it to me?’
Rebecca goes back to the voltage control and starts to ramp up the power.
‘Well, you know that nuclear fusion is the stuff that happens in the heart of stars, right?’
Nova doesn’t reply. The light she can see through the porthole is getting brighter and brighter, shedding its purple hue, the plasma shimmering indigo, then faint blue, then pure white. Beams of energy shine from the core like sunlight.
‘Well,’ Rebecca goes on, turning the dial up through its final few degrees, ‘when we talked on the phone, you said you were disappointed that you couldn’t see the stars. They were too small. And the guys here, the practical physicists, have a name for this thing when it’s up to full power.’
‘Oh?’ Nova’s voice feels distant from her body. The glowing point of light takes up her whole world – everything else is darkness. She is floating in space.
‘Yeah. They call it a “star in a jar”. And I thought, well, if you can’t see the stars up there, at least I can show you one down—’
Rebecca never finishes her sentence, because Nova has leapt off the lab stool and propelled herself forward. Her lips find Rebecca’s, which turn up in a grin.
‘Oof! Careful now – I am operating a nuclear device.’
‘You said it was safe.’ Nova’s voice is muffled, her face pressed into Rebecca’s chest.
‘What I said was—’ Rebecca is cut off again by Nova’s lips, pressing against hers. Her hands, soft and warm, go up and underneath Rebecca’s shirt, running fingers down her spine as the miniature sun flickers and burns.
It’s only the next day, as she’s putting junk mail in the recycling, that Kate remembers Nova’s card and present.
The present is crudely wrapped, despite being box-shaped. Kate tears the paper off to discover a paint-by-numbers kit. The picture is of a parrot, like one of the ones they saw in the zoo, sitting on a branch. The example picture is painted vividly in shades of red and yellow and blue, with a background of green leaves. Kate looks at the tiny pots of pre-mixed colour, feeling as though she has been spied on. There is no way Nova could know about the half-dozen times Kate has sat down to sketch something recently, only to find that there’s nothing she wants to sketch.
The handwriting in the card looks like a four-year-old’s – the letters grow and shrink, and refuse to stay on the line. The message is short, though it must have taken a long time to write.
Kate – thank you for everything! Nova
On the front of the navy-blue card are the words ‘Thank You’, and a large, golden star. She stares at it for a long time, until the star leaves an afterimage and her eyes are watering.
2
Bodies
Thirteen
January
KATE IS IN THE bathroom, fishing in the back of the cabinet for her birth-control pills, when a message comes through on her phone. She sees Nova’s name, stops what she’s doing, and sits on the edge of the bath.
Yo, Kate! Greetings from Venice.
Kate thinks about Nova speaking the words into her phone – she would send the message right after she had dictated it. Kate thinks of her, far away, putting her phone back into her pocket and walking with her girlfriend (as she is sure this ‘friend’ really is) to a gelateria, while Kate is sitting here in her dingy London bathroom.
Things are good here, though I cannot figure Venice out. It is mental – I don’t know where the sky ends and the water begins. Two much blue!!!
How are you? Hope it is not pouring it down in London. The whether here is very nice. (Just had to get the obligatory British mention of the weather in there, eh?)
Anyway the coffee and all the food here is amazing. I am sure I will be spherical by the time I get home. If I ever come home, ha ha!
I have been looking lots at the buildings, like you said I should. Can’t pretend to be an expert yet, but they do look more colourful than British buildings – they are pink and blue and green! I don’t really understand why someone would paint their house blue – isn’t this confusing when the sky is blue and the water is blue? Maybe it is like camouflage. Maybe they want their house to be invisible. Actually, that sounds quite cool.
Anyway, I hope you are okay and the flat conversion is going really well, which I’m sure it is because it is you who is doing it!
Have to go now – Rebecca wants to go to an exhibit about Gally lay oh. Bloody physicists.
Thinking of you!
Novafish ><;>
(Mistakes courtesy of my stoopid phone)
The new flat is quiet, and Kate doesn’t want to make any noise. She feels as though she’s trespassing. The electrician has gone, taking the spare key with him, and will return the next day. She perches on the windowsill and surveys the room. The flat was a wreck when they got it. They had stripped everything back to bare walls and floorboards, then they had pulled down the crumbling plaster and pulled up the sagging floors. Nothing original is left. It has been hard work, and expensive, but worth it, she keeps saying, to have the perfect home. Although the space is bare, the floor dust-strewn, Kate knows that the hard work is done, and what remains can come together quickly.
But she doesn’t feel this way. She feels as though the new flat will never be finished, and she will never live here. She feels like the flat is a metaphor for something, but she cannot decide what.
Kate walks through to the room that will be her study. On an easel in the corner is a half-finished paint-by-numbers picture of a vase of flowers. Since she completed the one that Nova gave her for Christmas, Kate has done six more of the kits, all here at the new flat. Tony thinks that the kits are stupid, ‘something for old ladies’, so when the builders go home she has stayed behind to paint. While she’s painting, her mind is quiet.
She stands in the unfinished room, listening to her tiny movements echoing back from the bare walls, until the cold seeps into her and she needs to move.
Nova has her eyes closed. She’s sitting on a chair by the window, her arms resting on the window ledge, forehead pressed against the cold glass. She can smell the mould of the wooden casing. She can feel the cold coming off the window, like heat off a fire. She never thought that Italy could be so cold. The cold seeps into her body.
Her strongest impression of Venice so far is the light. It is grey, above and below, and without warning, mist will fill every space. Venice seems to float not on water, but light.
RULE OF SEEING NO.174
If you go outside and everything is murky grey, do not worry. You are not developing cataracts. Fog changes the colour of everything.
Along with the mist is the smell of damp. Nova is sure that this cannot be ubiquitous to the city, but then she has seen so little of the city and so much of the Hotel Ernesto.
The Hotel Ernesto is thin but deep, a sliver of a building from the outside that seems to extend far back, like a rabbit warren. Much of the centre of the hotel is in permanent, windowless twilight.
Rebecca lies on the bed, fully dressed and snoring gently. They went for lunch at a restaurant a few streets back from St Mark’s Square, advertised as one of the cheapest in town. That’s what Rebecca told her, anyway. Actually, the food was overpriced, but the carafes of red wine were large and cheap.
They had drunk the first one between them, and Nova enjoyed herself. Rebecca became voluble with the wine, told jokes, and gave compliments to the waiters. Nova agreed reluctantly to the second carafe, but Rebecca had drunk most of it anyway. Nova was wearing her dark glasses, to take a break after a busy morning of looking at beautiful things, and couldn’t see where the wine was going.
Now she suspects that, at some point, Rebecca quietly finished off the second carafe and signed to the waiter to bring a third. This kind of communication is a mystery to her. People use hand signals, she knows – tapping an empty bottle or holding up a finger – and somehow this gets around any language barrier.
She isn’t sure how she got Rebecca back to the room. It wasn’t that she couldn’t walk, or that she wasn’t awake, but that she refused to admit she was lost. Finally, Nova had taken her dark glasses off, found the guidebook in Rebecca’s rucksack, and asked at the first café she’d spotted for directions. Following them had tired her out far more than dragging Rebecca along with her.
Now she’s tired, but Rebecca is taking up all the bed, and she has no desire to join her. She could go out again, but the exertion of finding her way back to the hotel made her want to curl up and keep her eyes closed for a long time. She could order coffee up to the room for Rebecca and put the TV on. On the first night, they had flicked through the Italian channels, and Nova had translated the cartoons and game shows to a giggling Rebecca.
But she doesn’t want Rebecca to wake up. She wants her to sleep all afternoon and into the evening, and wake to an empty room, knowing she has wasted the day. But of course, the room won’t be empty – Nova is going nowhere.
She wants to talk to Kate, but that would involve leaving the room. She could dictate another message, but that presents the same problem. Instead, she closes her eyes, rests her head against the cold glass of the window, and waits.
Last night, Kate sat at her architect’s desk, opened an unmarked floral-print notebook that her mother had given her for Christmas, and wrote ‘NOVA …’ on the first page.
She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to write next. Maybe she had intended to write a letter to her friend. Or a list of pros and cons about the interpreter. Or maybe she wanted to write something else – something not really about Nova at all, but about herself.
Her hand hovered over the page for a long time. But the message, whatever it was, would not come out of her. She felt blocked, stymied, constipated. Something had driven her to come to this room, and sit at this desk, and write this name in this empty notebook. Was she so screwed up that she couldn’t understand her own motivation for doing that?
There were no more words, but tears fell onto the expensive paper, making it warp. The page went from a plane to a hilly landscape, and Kate looked down at it, wondering why that image bothered her so much. Finally, she had torn the first page from the notebook and buried it under the other rubbish in the bin, as though it were an awful secret.
What was she doing? Kate was not so blind that she didn’t understand that the other woman had a powerful effect on her. But what effect was it, exactly? Was Nova a question or an answer? A beginning or an ending? Was she a friend? Or …
Kate had not finished the thought. She tied the wastepaper basket liner and took it through to the kitchen, put it in the main bin, tied that up, and took it out to the garden for collection.
Crumpled, wrapped in all its layers of plastic and destined for a corner of an anonymous landfill, Kate cannot not forget the word she wrote – four letters, N – O – V – A, like a magic formula that cannot be unmade.
Kate is sitting at the kitchen table when Tony comes home, looking over a sheaf of architectural drawings for the wine bar she is designing. Something isn’t quite right with the drawings. Symmetries and tessellations that once would have pleased her, stand out. She imagines the people sitting or standing, walking from here to there, chatting each other up or trying to make their friends laugh, kissing or arguing, and the perfect shapes seem to get in the way of the imperfect bodies.
‘I’m home,’ Tony calls.
Kate does not believe in any sixth sense, but knows in that moment that something is wrong. Usually, she would have made something for dinner, but he sent her a message at lunchtime to say that he would cook tonight. She had smiled at the gesture. He has been coming home late, recently, or disappearing at odd times. This seemed like an apology.
‘I’m in the kitchen.’
He appears, shucking off his boots in the doorway, a plain plastic bag in one hand. Kate can see something wrapped in white paper.
‘You still working?’ He looks down at the plans on the table.
‘No, just nitpicking.’ Kate gathers up the plans. Tony puts the carrier bag down on the table and takes out the paper parcel, then goes and washes his hands at the sink. Kate stares at the parcel as
though it might explode.
‘Making something special?’
He dries his hands on a tea towel and takes not one but two knives from the block, one small and sharp, the other wide-bladed and heavy. Practically a cleaver – a knife that Kate never uses.
‘Thought I’d try something different today.’ Kate can smell his too-strong cologne. It’s filling up the kitchen. ‘So I went to the market and bought this. Haven’t had one in years.’ He lays the knives either side of the parcel and starts to unwrap it with care, though his eyes are on her.
Kate gets her first glimpse of what is inside, and it confuses her. For a second, she thinks this must be a joke, because this is not food – Tony has wrapped up a fur stole. Then she realizes. The food is twice-wrapped, once in paper and once in fur. In the centre of the square of paper is a whole, dead rabbit.
Her eyes are wider than she wants them to be, and she fights to regulate her breathing. She cannot look away from the animal between them. It is dead, she tells herself – it is dead and cannot feel pain. But she does not feel that this is true. The rabbit is too whole, too rabbit-shaped. It is perfectly still, but its eyes are open and gleaming. Kate feels her own body, cold and limp, laid on the white paper shroud.
‘The butcher asked if I wanted it skinned, but I said I wanted to do it myself.’ Tony says, lightly. She looks to his face, which admits no hint of malice. He looks like he’s cooking her a nice dinner. An unusual dinner, perhaps, but still. Kate forces herself to smile.
‘I didn’t know you ever had.’
‘Dad taught me how.’
Kate clears her throat, feeling like a bad actor. ‘Do you … want any help?’ She gathers the plans and starts to rise, ready to make her escape.
‘No, I’ve got this. You can keep me company while I cook.’ He makes it sound like a suggestion, and Kate knows she could just make an excuse. She could go have a bath, or hoover the bedroom …