Past Present Future

by Alexander, N J.

  8 (x²) –512 = 0

  ‘Divide both sides by eight which will then leave you with:

  X² = 64

  ‘The square root of 64 is 8, So X equals 8:

  888 = 512

  ‘There, see’, I said, after frantically scribbling the workings down.

  ‘Yes, very good, that’s very clever of you.’

  ‘Thanks, but you’re not getting it. What’s weird is how 888 just so happens to balance perfectly, mathematically with William’s birthday, and he turns eight in four months’ time. And if William hadn’t been born, I would never have got involved with Ilex Drapes. And William was never supposed to happen. You know what the clinic said, that a child conceived naturally would be highly unlikely. For God’s sake we never even bothered with contraception for years because of that report you had done. But William was the entire reason I got involved with the company, so I could work flexible hours, and that company just so happens to have gone down this year – the year the world has passed through 08/08/08. The company collapsed the 14th of February, the day before William’s birthday. Don’t you think it’s just amazing?’

  ‘Ilex closed on the 15th,’ Richard corrected.

  ‘No it didn’t. It was the 14th remember?’

  ‘It was the 15th,’ he argued back.

  ‘It was not. I signed those papers in the offices on the 14th and I remember thinking what a shitty Valentine’s Day it was.’

  ‘Yes, but they didn’t go to the court until the 15th of February. I went down there first thing while you got the train down to London,’ he said defiantly, and then the penny dropped, he was right. I was in London on that Friday with Mum, Dad and Grandmama for William’s 7th birthday; Richard stayed with Elyse. I’d spent that entire weekend in a daze. The only kick back to reality was my mum’s sharp tongue (never great with sympathy) and William’s humour as he dashed through the Tube turnstiles at such lightning speed that I got knocked a foot back as they slammed shut on me. How could I forget all of that?

  ‘Well – that just goes and makes it even weirder,’ I said, thinking that a whole damn equation balanced my life.

  William’s birth took me away from Anthony Hope, and Ilex Blinds’ closure had brought me back to him as consequence of events which occurred on one precise date –15th February, or 2/15; if digitised and reversed.

  I’d always considered William as a small miracle who had saved me from a childless, empty pursuit of a career at the cost of what really mattered in life.

  ‘The numbers are merely coincidences, and coincidences are weird things. So, why are you staring at the mug now?’

  ‘Because I’m still wondering whether it’s due to a ghost or an angel. Look, there is no way on earth I would think of some random equation, that just so happens to balance with the number I drew the other day, and two significant events in my life.’

  ‘You drew a fish!’

  ‘I know, but I saw it as an eight first, and, like I told you, the fish and the three eights are connected. But, never mind that, did you know what a quadratic equation was? Would your head even be drawn in that direction? And just what are the odds of the dictionary being left open on that page, when neither of one of us recalls using it recently?’ I picked the dictionary up once more. ‘Look 632 pages in this book, and it just so happened to be open on that page – page 442. See…it doesn’t even open up naturally on that page, that’s not where the spine is weak,’ I said, with increasing frustration, as I wafted the book beneath his nose.

  ‘You need to calm down. Yeah, I can see it is strange and no, I wouldn’t think it up. But—’

  ‘You’re the walking computer and if your brain hadn’t gone there, my head certainly wouldn’t think it up, and I’m crap with dates, you know I never even remember the date we got together, you remind me every year. I just don’t pay attention to dates – my head just wouldn’t travel in that direction. By the way…did you know that Lewis Carroll was a mathematician as well as a writer, he even loved photography, and my camera was playing up just before all this weird stuff started,’ I said, trying to breathe deeply at the same time.

  ‘No, I didn’t know. But what has he got to do with anything? Is he your ghost now? I thought it was it Nell Gwyn, or Jesus Christ? I’m losing track.’

  ‘You’re not as confused as me. But my Facebook is covered in references to Alice in Wonderland. Doesn’t it strike you as strange that all the other spooky things that have occurred recently have been to do with windows and keys? And why doesn’t that text message bug you – it had no number attached to it and the wording was so old-fashioned. Not normal.’

  Richard shrugged his shoulders and dropped the corners of his mouth. ‘Just doesn’t, no point wasting energy on things you don’t have answers for.’

  Fortunately Richard’s complete lack of understanding of Facebook meant that informing him of my references to Alice in Wonderland on there could have been perfectly normal online behaviour for all he knew. I decided to let the flapping tea-bag drop, and filled him in on the genius of Lewis Carroll instead.

  ‘Lewis Carroll wrote a fair few maths books under his real name: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He got a double first from Christchurch at Oxford – a bit above my former polytechnic degrees – he was a logician, and he loved wordplay. He’d even been groomed to be a priest from being a boy. Just how do some people manage to cram so much knowledge into their heads?’

  ‘Well…your head is certainly funny, Little N, crammed full or not. Anyway, are you now going to drink your green tea?’

  ‘No. I didn’t make it to drink it, you can have if you want…’ and with that I wandered off with William’s endless Christmas wish list.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Pomona, the Roman Goddess of fruits and orchards, despite her great beauty, had no desire for marriage.

  She had turned away the most eligible suitors, preferring to spend her days pruning and nurturing blossoming trees in her own Garden of Eden.

  “If a tree stands alone, a vine has nowhere to grow and the grapes will wither and die,” said the old lady as she re-adjusted her dark cloak. Then she spoke some more, telling Pomona that Vertumnus loved her like no other and he would love her gardens as did she. Pomana’s heart softened, as she listened to the wise words. The old lady then shed her cloak, revealing her true self to Pomona.

  Now stood before her was the persistent Vertumnus, whose trickery and charm had finally seduced her. Pomona and Vertumnus married and lived happily, tending the orchards together.

  A naked bronze statue of Pomona, standing in the Pulitzer Fountain of Abundance can be found in a small park area, close to the Plaza Hotel in New York City. The sculptor, Karl Bitter, was killed after getting hit by a car on the day he completed the mould for Pomona. The work on the statue was completed by his assistant.

  * * *

  A video had been embedded into the online article, and I clicked on the small triangle to play it from my laptop.

  The establishing shot was the entire statue of Pomona, who was naked and holding a basket of mixed fruit; water was flowing from the mouths of rams at her feet and the sound of it cascading into the six basins beneath her could be heard above the sound of people passing by.

  The clip then cut to an arc shot, so Pomona could be seen from 360 degrees, and finally, the short clip cut to a tilt; starting from the lowest basin moving up. Then it finished on her behind; and that image dominated my laptop screen. It had to be an unfortunate technical glitch – or it could have been filmed by a man.

  I sighed. So why does Vertumnus remind me of Anthony Hope? Perhaps it was the man’s cunning trickery I wondered, as I scrolled back up to the article’s opening paragraph for a second glance:

  The Roman’s celebrated the harvest of apples each year with ‘Pomona Day.’

  ‘Pomona Day’ is one of the cultural influences which helped to shape what we know today as ‘Halloween.’

  ‘Halloween…’ I whispered to myself, and hit the “
X” to close down the site.

  Everyone had congregated round the kitchen table and we helped William and Elyse fill Mum, Dad and Grandmama in on their exciting day at the country park; my attempt at dragging Richard into a family day out, rather than us wasting yet another Sunday. Elyse climbed onto Grandmama’s knee, and William, after completing the tale of his adventures wandered off into the lounge to watch some TV.

  Mum asked how Bonnie and Clyde were, wondering if there was any sign of a trial yet, which there wasn’t, and Dad and Richard talked business for a while. Dad was finding it a struggle at the moment: he’d expanded just before the credit crunch, moved into bigger premises, and now sales had fallen, so every month was becoming a battle. It seemed that even those who had grown their company steadily for years were at risk from potential decimation; companies’ cash reserves are soon wiped out. I hated to hear of Dad struggling, it seemed so unfair, because after three heart attacks and a quadruple bypass, he could have spent the last fifteen years sitting on his rear, claiming benefits. He could have easily played on his health like thousands did after the ancillary mine industries went down, following the pit closures. But he didn’t, he used his engineering skills, set up on his own and kept fighting. With his small frame, and energy you’d never even guess he’d suffered the heart attacks, they were like silent ticking bombs that had gone off periodically since I was fourteen, leaving us all with a dreaded fear of unexpected phone calls at obscure hours.

  Richard opened the fridge door, clearly he was peckish, but he held up one of my alfalfa sprout bags.

  ‘Why do I keep finding out-of-date bags of these in here, why buy them if you’re not going to eat them?’ he asked, before lobbing them in the bin.

  ‘If I didn’t think I would eat them, I wouldn’t buy them, would I? For someone so intelligent you sometimes ask such stupid questions,’ I said, but I didn’t want to say that I wanted to eat them, but was finding them increasingly difficult to incorporate into food without it actually ruining the taste.

  ‘Is she still on some faddy diet, you’re too thin as it is,’ Mum said.

  ‘I’m not on a diet, nuts are actually fattening, but I keep forgetting to eat the sprouts,’ I defended myself, but my weight had dropped. It was nothing to do with a faddy health diet, it was called being too miserable to eat and I knew I couldn’t afford to lose any more weight; my skinny jeans were starting to fit like loose fit, and when my weight dropped too low my face became gaunt.

  ‘Well…you’re just too thin,’ she repeated.

  ‘Anyway, I think she’s about to join one of those religious cults,’ Richard craftily added.

  ‘I am not! I am merely trying to make sense of weird things, and I’m trying to be open-minded about everything that is happening around me and rule out the impossible. That does not make me a religious fanatic.’

  ‘She’s not still banging on about getting tapped on the shoulder is she?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Yes, she is, and now she’s drawing things and reading the Bible,’ Richard said and I saw the tension travel through Mum’s body.

  She could cope with us ill in a physical sense – just about, but odd behaviour on top of weight loss – she wouldn’t know how to deal with it. The problem with Mum is that she cares too much.

  ‘What ya been drawing Little N?’ Dad asked, holding back a smirk behind his mug of tea.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ I said, as I grabbed one of Elyse’s magazines from the far end of the table.

  ‘That’s my mazagine,’ Elyse said.

  ‘I’m only borrowing it, you can have it back in a minute,’ I didn’t bother correcting her because I was too eager to scribble things down for Dad.

  I felt like a teenager again and like Dad was helping me make sense of my homework.

  I started with the fish, explained that the Greek word for Jesus converted to 888 using Gematria along with all the other interesting facts about number 8. I then ran through the quadratic equation with him, the fact that the three eights balanced with William’s birthday and the day the court closed down Ilex Drapes. Dad’s lips remained in a pout, forcing the dimple in his chin to reveal itself. It was the expression he always had when he concentrated.

  ‘So, after the flapping tea-bag incident, and the discovery of the quadratic equation, I tried the automatic writing again. It was more a case of wanting it to throw up something that would rule everything else out as nothing but a coincidence. I was trying to prove a point to myself,’ I justified.

  ‘I keep telling her that coincidences are strange things Bill, but she won’t have it,’

  ‘But where does the eight come in, if you drew the fish symbol? Tell me that again.’

  ‘The fish and the 888 are closely connected. But there is a perfectly good reason why I saw the fish as an eight. Take a look at these three drawings,’ I said, as I scrawled them down on the page. Tell me what you see.’

  ‘A triangle, circle, and a rectangle,’ said Richard, as he peered over dad’s shoulder.

  ‘Yeah, same here,’ said Dad.

  ‘Not a pyramid, beach ball and a plasma TV then,’ I said smugly. Both of them looked at each other confused, not knowing where I was heading with this.

  ‘The reason that you both see a triangle, circle and rectangle is down to gestalt psychology. None of those drawings were complete shapes. I missed a section from each and your brain completed them for you; it’s called “closure”. A familiar shape can depend on your own understanding of the world. So the reason that I saw my drawing as a number eight was because my brain completed the image to form a familiar shape; just like it should do. The Christian symbol of the fish wasn’t familiar to me, and if I was to draw a fish, mine would have an eye and fins, basically the whole works. I believe I saw what I was supposed to see at that point in time.’

  ‘Who is Gestalt anyway?’ said Dad still looking at my drawings.

  ‘Gestalt isn’t a person, it means seeing something as a whole rather than organised parts. You must have seen the famous gestalt photo of the young girl and old woman where it is very difficult to see both simultaneously?’ I said, as I filled in the missing section on the three shapes.

  ‘Oh yeah, I think I have seen it somewhere,’ said Dad.

  ‘There is only one difference between a young girl and old lady,’ said Richard grinning through his long pause, ready for his punch line. ‘And that’s time. Isn’t that right Bill?’ And both Dad and Richard chuckled like two schoolboys in front of four generations of females.

  ‘Okay. So what else have you been drawing then?’ Dad said, curbing his chuckles.

  ‘The letter ‘D’ and a dot, as in a “.” or full-stop,’ I said, as I used the pen to re-create a tiny dot on the paper.

  Dad looked puzzled. ‘Surely that can’t mean anything?’ he said, as he pulled the magazine towards him, so that he could see it better.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ said Richard and I glared at him again. Fortunately Mum and Grandmama were still being distracted by Elyse as we were doing this.

  ‘Like you, Dad, when I first looked at it, it looked entirely meaningless. And I’ll even admit that I was a little disappointed, because it meant that everything else must have been a coincidence. But after a few minutes I looked at it again, and played around with it.’

  ‘How can you play around with a dot and the letter D?’

  ‘Wait for it,’ said Richard. ‘This is Nicole, after all.’

  ‘It was easy. All I did was convert the tiny dot into the word ‘dot.’ So then it became either DDOT or DOTD,’ I said and pulled the colouring book back towards me so I could write both versions down. ‘But DDOT didn’t look right, and the other thing is that the fish I drew had been in reverse, so my instinct was to do the same with this and put the dot before the D to make the DOTD,’ I added.

  ‘But what is DOT, D,’ he said. ‘Or even D, O, T, D.?’

  ‘This is where it got interesting. What day did I get tapped on the shoulder?’

  ‘
Er…Halloween, when Elyse had the sleepover at ours.’

  ‘Yes, exactly, and DOTD is the official abbreviation for Day of the Dead. It scared the crap out of me when it came up on my computer screen – I thought it meant either William or I was going to die because it was William’s birthday, which was in the quadratic equation.’

  ‘What is the Day of the Dead? I’ve never heard of it,’ Dad asked, before finishing off his mug of tea.

  ‘Apparently, “The Day of the Dead” translates to “Los Dias de los Muertos”. It’s an event which has evolved with influences from the Celtics, Romans and Aztecs. It’s a three-day festival held in Mexico at the same time as Halloween, All Saints Day and All Souls Day.’

  ‘I know about All Souls Day,’ said Richard. ‘It is the day that you remember and pray for those in purgatory; to help them enter through the Pearly Gates.’

  ‘You’re right and it’s celebrated on the 2nd of November. But All Saints Day is celebrated on the 1st of November and it is also known as Hallow’s Day, or Hallowmas, which is the day after All Hallow’s Eve, otherwise known to us as Halloween. So are you starting to see the connection? I get tapped on the shoulder on Halloween and then I go and draw something that turns out to be the vital link between religion, spirituality and Halloween. That can’t be a coincidence, surely?’ Neither Richard nor Dad came forth with an alternative, more rational explanation.

  ‘It turns out that there is a serious religious belief that around the Halloween period, the spiritual veil between our world and the next world is at its thinnest. So that could possibly be why the shoulder tapping occurred when it did. There appears to be far more to Halloween than all of the commercial crap.’

  ‘Life is strange,’ said Dad. ‘But you know my theory of alter- native dimensions, and that spirits could be where one dimension crosses over another.’

  ‘I’m not saying I’m right about all this. All I am saying is, drawing the DOT and the D at that point was hugely significant to me. But even if this came from my subconscious, it took my conscious brain to translate it. Have you heard of Jung’s theory on synchronicity? It is from the 1950’s.’ Both shook their heads. ‘Synchronicity is the idea that life is not a string of random events, but rather that there is some kind of deeper cosmic order and that our minds have a kind of psychic access which enables us to see the present, past and future events. It’s a belief that says that our minds can tap into a whole wealth of information; like some kind of database. Jung believed in things like ESP, telepathy and spirituality. But Synchronicity is when…,’ I said, whilst trying to think of an example, ‘…it’s when you think about someone, and within seconds your phone rings and it’s that person on the other end…’