Speed of Light, The

by Cowley, Joy

  He couldn’t. His face was hot and he clicked his ballpoint pen, in, out, in, out. Two and seven. In his numbers game, the skeleton of a newborn baby was a nine. How could he explain that?

  * * *

  When he arrived home, there was no one there but big Eddie, who had been planting spring bulbs along one wall and was now scooping some stray leaves out of the swimming pool. The sun was still high and Eddie’s forehead had beads of sweat like transparent pimples. Jeff wondered why Eddie only did gardening when he was good at so many things, like making furniture and fixing cars.

  “How are you, kid? How was the day at school?”

  “Okay, I suppose.” He needed to say something more. “The pool looks nice. I mean, you keep it nice and clean.”

  “It’s a waste. No one ever uses it.”

  “We use it. Sometimes. I had a swim two days before the storm.”

  Eddie shrugged and went down a step to pick something out of the water, a dark green beetle. He put it carefully on a stone in the cactus garden, then took up his net to scoop another leaf. “It’s all a bit of a waste. Four families could live in this house, you know. Twenty kids could swim in the pool. Don’t you ever feel it’s a bit big for four people?”

  “No.”

  Eddie nodded as though the answer needed a lot of thought, and Jeff immediately went into his room and changed into his bathing shorts. He came out, ran across the concrete and did a spectacular plunge into the pool.

  Oh, it was cold. It was really cold. He stood gasping, and then did two vigorous lengths of crawl with Eddie watching.

  “That’s pretty good, man,” said Eddie. “You got your arms and legs going fine in synch, but try not to bring your shoulders out of the water when you breathe.”

  Jeff wiped his face. “What do you mean?”

  “Resistance. You lose speed. Keep your body straight and roll on the downstroke so your mouth is out. Look. Like this.” He lay on the concrete at the edge of the pool, like a huge sea lion. “Roll like this. See? You keep your shoulders straight and you don’t lose speed. Try it.”

  Jeff would have tried it, but at that moment Winston appeared through the glass doors, dark suit, briefcase in hand. “What’s going on?”

  Eddie got to his feet. “Afternoon, Mr Lorimer.”

  “He was showing me how to breathe.” Jeff climbed out of the pool, hugging himself. “I lift my shoulders out of the water and it slows me down.”

  Winston walked up to Eddie, really close. “I don’t pay you to be my son’s swim coach. Jeff, go inside at once!”

  Jeff ran past them, into the house, dripping on the cold marble floor. He turned on the shower and stood shivering under the hot water, his arms still clenched around his chest. What is a number? A multitude composed of units. What is a line? A length without a breadth. What is a square? A quadrilateral which is both equilateral and right-angled. He stopped shivering and rested his head against the shower wall. “I hate him,” he said. “I hate him, I hate him.”

  * * *

  The next morning, Saturday, he biked to the library to return some books. The place was crowded, elderly people fumbling with their cards and big print novels, mothers trying to stop toddlers from pulling books out of shelves, a man reading the newspapers, several people at the computers, a woman complaining about the price of coffee and another yelling at a child who was standing on a table. Jeff guessed there were as many words hanging in the air as there were trapped in pages. He handed in the books and was wondering if he should take more out, when he got that familiar sensation under his ears. Pressure. He turned quickly. Yes, she was standing in the narrow aisle between Philosophy and Psychology, in that dark padded jacket with the pink scarf and knitted hat, leaning forward, her hand folded over a wooden walking stick. She watched him with something like a smile. Her eyes were dark and unblinking.

  His instinct told him to bolt out the door and not look back, but his feet did not move. His mind of its own accord started counting seconds. One, two, three, four …

  She waited. He guessed she knew he wouldn’t run away. He walked slowly towards her, weaving around people until he was close enough to see the thin cracks around her mouth.

  “How are you, Jeff?” she said.

  “Okay. How are you?”

  “You want the truthful answer or a polite one?” She thrust her head forward, her gaze full of mischief.

  “Truth,” he said.

  “I wish I wasn’t here. I hate this prison you call a body. The real Maisie was glad to be leaving it. You don’t often see them so excited. Going home, she was, like a child running down a hill. She said I could use her body, only it was no gift, believe me. I had to take it. It’s my job. Do you mind if I sit down?”

  “No, no.” He remembered his manners and pulled out a library chair with a padded seat. She sank down with a sigh, the stick between her knees, her hands folded over the top. Her hair was fluffy at the edges of the hat, floating against the purple wool, like cobweb. He dared to say, “What is your job?”

  “I already I told you. I’m one of the dream-keepers.”

  He wondered if a dream-keeper was like a dream-catcher, a Native American weaving, round, with beads and feathers, an object that people hung above their beds so they would have pleasant dreams. Andy had a dream-catcher from a friend in America.

  He smiled politely. “I don’t dream a lot,” he said.

  “Number Nine, you live in a dream. You all do. What you call life is a dream and you don’t wake up until you die. I’m in the dream now too, and I’d much rather be awake because this old body is more a nightmare, if you don’t mind me saying so. I got stuck in the bath, this morning. The arms and legs wouldn’t work to get me out.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “What an old body has to do is turn over. You get on hands and knees and then stand, holding on to the edge of the bath so you don’t slip. But I suppose by the time you’re old, you’ll have forgotten that bit of wisdom.”

  “I’m sorry. I mean I don’t understand about living in a dream.”

  She tapped her stick on the carpet. “That’s because you’re too young to know where you are going, too old to remember where you came from. How can I make it clear? When your spirit inhabits a body, it goes into the dream you call life. Then all you know is the information that comes to you through the body’s five senses, what you see, hear, taste, smell, touch. The rest is a forgetting.”

  “Forgetting?” He was puzzled.

  “None of this will make much sense to you now, but try to remember my words. They’ll mean survival when you need it. They’re about something unchanging.”

  “You mean mathematics?” he said. “That’s unchanging.”

  “Ah!” Her eyes glinted. “We’ll get to numbers in a moment. This is the bit to remember. Your little dream of life exists between the sleep you call birth and the waking you call death. The bigger reality is all around you right now, but you are shut off from it by those limited senses.”

  “What bigger reality?” He glanced away and saw that people were watching. “Are you talking about the universe?”

  “You’re supposed to be smart! Not the universe as you know it. That’s a product of your senses. The big reality! How do I explain it? I’m talking about the realm of spirit! A word that might have meaning for you is Light.”

  “Light?”

  “Yes, Light.” She smiled showing her broken teeth. “Look inside yourself, Jeff. You come from the Light and you still have a memory of the Light in you. Go deep and find it. Hold on to it. Sure as gravity, you’ll need it in the changes. It will tell you what to do.”

  Changes. The word made his breath catch and he felt fear. He already knew there was going to be big change. He saw it coming like the great black cloud that marched before last week’s storm.

  She read his feelings. “Don’t fuss, Number Nine. It’s part of the paths you and your family have chosen and it’s meant to be. The outcome will
be right for all of you.”

  He stared at her. “You know about us. I don’t even know your real name.”

  “Maisie will have to do,” she said.

  “Miss – Maisie, you were going to say something about mathematics.”

  “Was I?”

  “Yes, you said –”

  “Then I’ve forgotten.” She waved her hand in front of her face. “It’s an old brain. There are gaps between the synapses.”

  “The brain has one hundred billion cells,” he reminded her.

  “Not all of mine are in working order,” she snapped. “One hundred thousand, one hundred billion – who cares? Numbers cross over into the larger reality, the same here as there. Now I’m tired. You’d better go.” She shut her eyes in dismissal.

  He stood for a few seconds but she didn’t look at him again, so he took three steps backwards and left the library.

  * * *

  Walking up the hill towards home, Jeff paused to look down at the harbour. It was a great pond of light, water dancing with sun dazzle. Was that the kind of Light she meant? If it was, there was certainly no sparkle inside him. It was puzzling when you felt something had meaning but didn’t know what that meaning was.

  He arrived at the top of the hill and saw a man standing at the intercom by their locked gate. He had grey hair, a grey moustache and he wore blue overalls, paint-stained, ragged at the knees.

  “Who are you looking for?” Jeff asked.

  “Mr or Mrs Lorimer,” the man replied.

  “There’s no one home,” Jeff said.

  “That explains it then,” the man said. “I’ve been pressing the bell for a good five minutes. Do you belong here?”

  He nodded. “I’m their son, Jeff Lorimer.”

  The man held out his hand, “Pleased to meet you, Jeff. I’m Henry Sorensen, the replacement gardener.”

  5

  EARTH’S CRUST varies in thickness, thinner under oceans and thicker under the continents. The inner core and the crust are solid. The outer core and mantle layers are plastic and semi-fluid. The crust extends from the surface down 40 km, and the upper mantle from 40 km to 400 km. There is a transition region, 400–650 km, before the lower mantle, which is 650–2700 km. The “D” layer, 2700–2890 km, surrounds the outer core, which is 2890–5150 km. The depth of the inner core is 5150–6378 km.

  Each of the seven layers has distinct chemical and seismic properties.

  Andrea wasn’t home. She had promised to take him to a movie, but she had been gone all day. Winston was at his office, and Helen went to the supermarket before having a cappuccino with two old school friends. When she came in, she had the car to unpack, groceries to put away, and she was short with words.

  “Eddie wasn’t suitable,” she said, stacking the frozen foods.

  “He was. He knew everything about gardens. You tell me one thing he did that wasn’t right.”

  “Don’t argue, Jeffrey. I get enough of that from your sister. It was your father’s decision, and he decided Mr Sorensen was more experienced.”

  “Experienced how?”

  “He does landscape gardening. He’s a professional. Will you stop sulking and take these through to the laundry?”

  He carried two packets of laundry powder to the back of the house and stowed them in the laundry cupboard. Through the glass-panelled door he could see the cactus garden and a corner of the pool. He walked back to the kitchen, nineteen steps instead of the usual twenty-one. “Dad hated Eddie and it wasn’t Eddie’s fault.”

  His mother didn’t look at him. “Nonsense,” she said.

  “It’s true. Dad’s homophobic.”

  Helen closed the fridge door. “Jeffrey! That’s disgusting! Where do you get language like that? Would you be happy if I told your father what you just said?”

  “You can! I don’t care.”

  “Stop! Not one more word!” She put some apples into the bowl on the counter. “I don’t like your tone. You can go to your room.”

  “I can’t. I’ve got cricket.” Anger made him strong. He took an apple from the bowl, and bit into it hard, imagining that he had titanium teeth slicing through a cricket ball.

  “No cricket!”

  “Mum, I have to go to cricket. Mr Ingles said!”

  “I will phone Mr Ingles and tell him you’re gated,” Helen said. “This is a family matter and more important than boys batting a ball around a playing field.”

  His anger increased, flaring into his hands, making them want to smash things, throw stuff across the room. He curled his fingers into fists and thrust them in his pockets. “We don’t bat a ball around a field! This is cricket! If you came and watched some of our games, you’d know something about it.”

  “Jeffrey, one more word and you’re gated next Saturday as well. I’m not telling you again. Go to your room.” She pointed with a straight arm and finger that looked so ridiculous, he would have laughed if he hadn’t been upset.

  He went because there was nowhere else to go, and lay face down on the bed, his breath hot on the pillow. Why wasn’t Andrea here? She had promised. The movies didn’t matter. He could watch a film any time, anywhere. It was what she said about them sticking together. We are all we’ve got, she’d once told him. Was that only true for the moment of the saying?

  His breathing became slower and the anger subsided into a feeling of helplessness and sadness. Eddie had gone. He rolled over onto his back and somewhere between himself and the ceiling, saw a picture of the gardener lifting that green beetle out of the swimming pool. It was such a clear memory, Eddie’s smooth brown fingers cupped under the little thing, taking it to the cactus garden, and then tilting it so that it slid onto a dry flat stone, its legs waving. He’d turned it over. The green shell on its back separated like elevator doors and two little wings came out to carry it away to some place it knew to be home. Jeff blinked. The other memory was his father large in his dark office suit, shouting across the yard as he walked towards the gardener. Jeff had run into the house, leaving Eddie with Winston, and something had happened to make it Eddie’s last day in the garden. What had his father said to Eddie? Was this what the woman had meant by change? He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. The old lady, Maisie or whatever her name was, had told him there would be big changes, and he had felt something in him respond to that, something like an electric shock in his body.

  It was hard to know what was real with that old lady. Most of the time, she seemed to be wandering around some dark maze in her brain, where sentences deconstructed and then glued together again in random ways. Helen’s great-aunt was like that. She stared at you with vacant eyes and just as you got to thinking that all the rungs had fallen off her ladder, she turned on you and asked you the score of last night’s rugby test match. But Maisie was a bit different. Great-aunt Rose said mostly nonsense and some things that were real. The Maisie lady had three categories: nonsense, real, and other statements that weren’t logical but had an effect on him, like they were something he was supposed to know but had forgotten.

  He wanted to talk to Andrea about the conversation in the library.

  It was very important that he do that. He tried again to phone her, but of course her mobile was switched off and there was no point in leaving a message. Instead he sent her a text message: Did u no E was fired? J.

  Afterwards, he realised that of course Andrea would know. She was up to date with everything that happened in the family. Besides, he didn’t want to talk about Eddie as much as about the old gum tree woman who was attaching herself to him for some reason. If he was to find out why, he needed to know more about her, and that meant separating the real from the craziness. Maybe a good way to start would be to find out more about dementia. He sat at his desk and started his computer. It had barely booted up when there was a soft knock on the door and Helen came in.

  “You can go to cricket,” she said.

  He swivelled in his chair. That meant she had probably phoned Mr Ingle
s, who had left her in no doubt that he wanted all the team at the clubhouse at one o’clock. He wanted to say, I told you so, but couldn’t risk as much as a smile. She was still angry with him.

  She came into the room and sat on the edge of the bed. “Jeffrey, parents are not as stupid as children believe. I know what it’s like to be your age. You don’t know what it’s like to be mine.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Your father did what he thought was right, and I agreed with his decision. It was our decision to make – not yours, not the gardener’s. I want you to understand that.”

  “I understand,” he said. “Is that it?”

  “No.” She folded her hands in her lap. “There is something else. I need to tell you that Beckett is coming back to New Zealand next month. He’ll be in prison in Auckland. We haven’t been given the exact date of his transfer but I think we can be sure it will all be very public again – newspapers, television.”

  “Aren’t you pleased he’s coming back?”

  “Well, of course, we’re pleased. He’s much safer over here. But you may wish to be prepared for questions. People will know, although, thank God, not everyone will connect the name with us. There are a surprising number of Lorimers.”

  He waited.

  “Jeffrey, if someone asks you, you won’t be telling a lie if you say he is not a part of our family.”

  “But he is! Mum, he’s my brother!”

  “Sweetie, we gave Beckett every chance and he betrayed us time and time again. Your father even believed him when he claimed he was framed. That was just another lie. The cocaine wasn’t in his suitcase, it was strapped around his middle. But it started long before that, one disappointment after another. Criminal friends. Unpaid fines. Arrested for being drunk and disorderly. I believe that a family has the right to divorce an ungrateful child, so I’m saying, you won’t be telling a lie –”

  Andrea’s words echoed in his head, don’t let them get to you, and then, for some odd reason, he remembered the feeling of Beck’s hand in his when he was four and scared of balloons. He stood up. “I need to go,” he said. “Mr Ingles will be waiting for the team.”