‘No. And you look familiar too. Now answer my question.’ She wasn’t to be diverted.
‘Sixteen.’ I didn’t add ‘just’. My birthday had been a quiet affair in the aftermath of the most insane January of my life. Possibly of anyone’s life. The day following it had brought the news that I was officially in remission from my leukaemia, a gift that brought about a smaller and more heartfelt celebration.
‘You must be that kid who was in the papers. That’s why you look familiar.’ Helen set her book down. ‘The wunderkind.’
‘I guess so.’ I shook out my wrinkled and slightly drier trousers. The fall had put a hole in the right knee. The hire shop would not be pleased. ‘Look, I’d better go.’
I hated all the wunderkind stuff. Half the tabloids had run with a photo of me caught by surprise at my front door, looking more gormless than I had thought any person could look. The Sun had the headline, ‘Suicide boffin’s son turns Time Lord’. The others were almost as lurid. At least none of them had tied me to three corpses in a microchip laboratory some months earlier. For that I was grateful. I had erased the memory of the incident, but the ghosts of Demus and Mr Arnot still haunted me. And the world might be better off without Ian Rust but I was glad not to remember seeing him die.
‘You should hang your stuff outside my window. Be dry in a half an hour with all this sun.’
‘I . . .’
‘I’ll tell you all about biochemistry. I can tell that you’re interested.’ She gave a grin so wicked that I found its echo on my lips. Her face had a delicacy to it, sharp cheekbones, a narrow beauty. I found it difficult to imagine her felling two of the hooray henrys who had been chasing me. But she had, and she’d scared off the others. I made a note not to forget that.
We actually did end up talking about biochemistry. While my socks, trousers and underwear dangled misleadingly outside her window in the June sunshine I sat in Helen’s guest chair with a hand towel to cover my modesty and asked her about the effects of magnetic fields on the human brain. Specifically I was interested in memory, having recently erased two weeks of my own. I didn’t admit to that, of course. Neither did I tell her that my last memory before the wipe was of convincing a girl called Mia into a car driven by my older self from the future, and that my next was of finding myself sat beside Mia on a park bench. Or that in my hand had been a note from myself suggesting that I kiss her.
Unsurprisingly, as a first-year student Helen didn’t know much about the subject of memory, other than that magnetic fields were known to have a wide range of effects on the brain. She seemed interested though, and promised to ask one of her lecturers who specialised in the neurophysiology of the brain. This was good, because in my room I had two headbands that would erase and record memories, and sometime in the next twenty-five years I had to invent them. If I didn’t manage it then I’d get to find out first hand just what the consequences of breaking the universal laws of cause and effect were. It would be a lot easier if someone like Helen invented it for me and let me get on with the thorny issue of inventing time travel.
‘So this Professor Halligan is a big deal then,’ Helen said, ending our biochemistry tutorial abruptly.
‘He really is. If you ask Joe Bloggs in the street for famous scientists they’ll give you Einstein and Newton. Galileo at a stretch. Ask for someone current and a small number might know Richard Feynman. After that, if you’ve picked a more knowledgeable Joe Bloggs, it will be Hawkins or Halligan.’
‘Who’s Hawkins?’
‘Exactly. Anyway, the point is that Cambridge don’t want to lose him so he gets away with a lot.’
‘The papers said you turned up in one of his third-year lecture courses and caused a riot.’
‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ I said.
I’d been playing around with mathematics since I was twelve. My dad taught me the basics but I’d never been keen. I think it was because he so clearly wanted me to love it like he did. But maths was what kept my father away, it was what sent him around the world to international conferences, what kept him in the university until the small hours, and huddled him over a desk in his upstairs office at weekends. Mathematics was my rival for his affections, and I wanted no part of it.
That was until my dad’s suicide.
They said it was fear that put him in the path of that train. They said he couldn’t face his cancer, couldn’t bear the suffering it was putting him through. Maybe that was true. The doctors had said it was terminal. But when Mother brought home his notebooks from the university they told a different story. A story that almost no one in the world could read.
‘My father was a famous mathematician,’ I told Helen. ‘If that’s not an oxymoron. Let’s say he was nearly as famous as mathematicians get, a rung below Halligan if you like. He had a theorem named after him and two conjectures.’
‘Two what nows?’
‘Conjectures. A conjecture is an interesting mathematical statement that nobody has been able to prove or disprove. Fermat’s Last Theorem is a conjecture because it hasn’t been proved. The proof he claimed to have found in 1637 was lost because he said it was too big to fit in the margin of the page and that he had written it somewhere else. Somewhere that was then lost to us. So it remains unproved. Anyway . . . it turns out I’m quite good at maths too.’
I rambled on, forgetting my state of undress, the stinging of my grazed palms, the girl on the bed. Just talking. I don’t know what undid my tongue. Maybe something about her. That unexplained déjà vu and the way she’d come to my aid. Or maybe it was just knowing that she wouldn’t believe me.
In my father’s notes I found that the theorem that bore his name, and whose proof he had delivered to great acclaim at a conference in New York shortly before his diagnosis, was flawed. He had discovered an error in the proof and the notebooks evidenced increasingly desperate attempts to reformulate it. My father had seen it as his legacy. The thing that would bear his name throughout history once he was gone. Instead what he’d given the world was a ticking time bomb. Sooner or later the error would be noticed, the conjecture disproved and forgotten, or proved by someone else.
I think it was that despair that made him take his life. Not the chemotherapy, surgery and hospital beds. We all have something that’s just too much for us. Everyone does. We may never meet it, but it’s out there, waiting. We all have something that will make us take that same train my father took.
After his death mathematics became my enemy and I attacked it hard. It should have been me that my father saw when he looked for what was going to take his name into the future. Me, Nicholas Hayes. Not the Hayes Theorem of Topological Compactness. I fixed his proof for him and proved both his conjectures. I leaked the results to a professor at Imperial College some years later, offering them up as my dad’s unpublished works, found beside his death bed.
‘And yet you stayed at school doing O-levels just like everyone else?’
‘I wanted a life. You do this stuff out in the open and suddenly that’s all that anyone sees. I wanted to muck around, play D&D, meet girls—’
‘Those last two are often mutually exclusive.’ Helen smiled.
‘Anyway, just after Christmas something happened that made me really find my focus. I suddenly wanted to achieve something, make a difference, use the skills I inherited.’
‘The cancer?’ She came right out with it. Most people hesitate when they say the C-word, just a little, as if they still need to convince themselves you don’t get it just by saying it out loud. Like it was one of those demon lords in D&D that are summoned by name. Say Demogorgon too many times and he was pretty much bound to show up, but cancer . . . not so much.
I smiled bravely. I didn’t want to say ‘yes, it was the cancer that made me knuckle down’ because it wasn’t true. And I didn’t want to say ‘no, it was a visit from future-me saying I had to invent time travel in order to save the girl who dumped me a month later’ because that just sounded crazy. So instead I answe
red, ‘The photographers got to me before my hair grew back properly, which pissed me off at the time, but was a blessing in disguise cos now no one recognises me from the articles they ran.’
I said ‘before my hair grew back properly’ but it hadn’t really. It came back different. It wasn’t the only thing to have changed. My friendships had too. But as for the hair, it had grown back finer and more brittle as if it were still busy carrying the chemo poisons out of my system.
‘So tell me about the not-riot,’ Helen said.
‘Well, first I needed to find out who could help me,’ I said. ‘I spent a week buried in the bowels of Imperial College hunting through dusty science journals in the university stacks. I was supposed to be recuperating. Instead I nearly put myself back in hospital, but I did find out for sure that Halligan was the one I really needed to talk to. His papers were exactly the thing I was looking for. He’d been thinking about the same things that I had and found part of the answer too.
‘Unfortunately he’s also as close to a rock star as any mathematician is ever going to get. That means he’s deluged in mail from would-be collaborators and from other mathematicians with questions. My dad used to get more than he could read and he wasn’t nearly such a big deal.’ I found Helen easy to talk to. She just stretched out and listened. So I rambled on, falling back into the moment.
February 1986, London
I had known it would be hard to get Halligan’s attention. I was still fifteen and I looked it. In a field like the professor’s it takes time to prove you really know what you’re talking about and he wasn’t going to give that time to a random schoolboy.
So, just to begin intelligence gathering in order to plan my approach, I phoned the faculty secretary at Cambridge. I pretended to be a postdoctoral researcher returning from illness and needing to catch up with Halligan.
‘Well, you know he hates interruptions, so don’t go knocking at his door for heaven’s sake!’ The lady at the other end sounded alarmed at the very prospect.
‘No. I value my life more than that!’ Also I had no idea where his office was. ‘Maybe I could book an appointment?’
‘I can give you the number of his personal secretary. You should probably prepare yourself for a long wait . . .’
‘Or maybe just try to catch him at the end of a lecture?’
‘Well now, that’s quite an art form but you can certainly try, and it might be your best bet. Let me see . . .’ I heard her start to leaf through papers. ‘His Advanced Algebraic Topology on Complex Manifolds course is almost finished. After that he isn’t down to lecture again until the summer. More research and less lecturing – one of the perks of fame!’
‘And the next lecture is when?’
More leafing. ‘Friday. And I think . . . yes . . . that’s the last one.’
‘Sh— Dash it!’ I tried to sound more Cambridge student and less foul-mouthed fifteen-year-old. ‘Friday as in tomorrow Friday?’
‘Yes.’
‘And where would this be?’
‘In the Cockroft.’
‘The Cockroft?’
A pause. ‘Sorry, what did you say your name was again?’
I hung up. I guessed I was supposed to know what the Cockroft was but it didn’t sound like any Cambridge college I’d ever heard of. Though on reflection I could only name about three, and there might be hundreds for all I knew.
‘Shit.’ So much for careful planning.
I took the 07:10 train from King’s Cross. John came with me. I wasn’t sure why I’d asked him to come, but as we jolted our way out of London it still seemed a good idea. He was two months younger than me but looked old enough to be a student – annoyingly handsome, broad-shouldered, blond hair somehow naturally coming as close to a quiff as you could get away with at Maylerts.
‘Nicky Hayes, bunking off school, never thought I’d see the day.’ John gave that easy grin of his.
I shrugged. The way he talked you’d think John was a regular truant, which he wasn’t. He played by the rules just like I did, only he always managed to make it seem like he was doing exactly what he wanted to and thereby retained all his cool points.
John pulled out his newspaper. A broadsheet that required at least two seats to unfold properly. In my opinion he rarely read more than five per cent of it, if that, but it was part of his vision of ‘grown-up John’. His father always carried The Times under his arm, I’d noticed. ‘At least you’ll have no trouble pulling a sickie.’
‘No.’ Now that my hair was starting to grow back John had no problem ribbing me about the leukaemia. As far as he was concerned I was cured. The whole thing done and dusted, the only legacy being an easy time of it when it came to getting days off sick. ‘I guess not.’
‘So, Hooligan—’
‘Halligan.’
‘You think he can help you with your sums and . . .’ John frowned. ‘I don’t see what’s in it for him though? You said Demus didn’t tell you how he did . . . all that stuff.’
‘Well, I know a few things.’ I lowered my voice, though I’ve no clue why I would whisper about time travel when half the while we were discussing orcs or dragons or spells. ‘Like, I know a person can travel back in time.’
‘Hell, I know that. Do you think he’ll want to talk to me too?’
‘I speak his language. I need to get on with this. I can’t waste the rest of the year with O-levels and then another two years in sixth form.’
‘Waste?’ To his credit John kept any hurt from his voice but I glimpsed the edges of it around his eyes. He rallied himself. ‘You have to stay, don’t you? How would you even get into university without exams?’
‘I didn’t mean to say “waste” . . .’ I said. In my small group of friends John had been our star player. He had everything going for him. The looks, the money, the charisma. How he ended up playing D&D with social losers like me and Simon I don’t know. But like Elton he was popular enough that any ensuing loss of cool hardly dented his standing. Then all of a sudden I had leukaemia and my future self showed up, pretty much guaranteeing me a hot girlfriend and worldwide fame. At least I assumed that cracking the theory of time travel and then actually making it technically doable would make me famous. Either of those things on its own should be enough for a Nobel Prize and a lifetime of front page news.
When the focus in a group shifts like that it can upset everything. I thought perhaps that our friendship had survived only because John had shrewdly noted that the future Demus had gone bald and then died at age forty.
‘Why didn’t you ask Mia to come too?’ John changed the subject.
‘Who says I didn’t?’
John rolled his eyes.
‘I don’t know. It’s just . . . Everything is a bit strained. I know you said we seemed good together before that night. But now, it’s like . . . It’s like me and Mia are fated to be together. It’s like there’s no choice and we know where we’re heading.’
‘Pressure, dude!’ John always said ‘dude’ as if he were trying it on for size. But he was right. Romance and love can endure external pressure to end them. Being told no just made Romeo and Juliet get serious. But those emotions don’t do so well if that pressure is trying to make them happen instead of trying to make them stop. It’s like having a gun to your head and being told to laugh convincingly at a joke or you get a bullet.
We exited Cambridge station into the teeth of a cruel February wind. I hunched in my coat, and was for once actually glad of the woolly hat that covered my chemo baldness. John led on with confidence though he had no better idea of the way than I did.
The mysterious Cockroft sounded as if it might have been a public house, gentlemen’s club or Michelin-starred restaurant. It turned out to be a lecture hall. We only needed to ask ten different students and waste half an hour walking out of town following fake directions before we found that out.
I got to the lecture sweaty and red-faced despite the cold. John, as ever, looked ready for the front page of a
fashion magazine. We were late and a small crowd of students had gathered in the corridor around the open doors to the hall, unable to fit in.
I found myself facing a wall of backs. Worse still, they were talking among themselves so loudly I couldn’t even tell if Halligan had started lecturing.
‘. . . don’t think there’s a single third year left in there.’
‘. . . half are faculty, and the rest are postdocs and grad students . . .’
‘. . . big finale we’re hoping!’
I turned to John helplessly. ‘He must be airing his current research. Has to be if he’s managed to scare off all his actual students.’
‘Who are this lot then?’ John asked.
‘Staff and guys doing PhDs.’ I said guys because apart from one severe-looking woman on the opposite side from me every one of them was male. I was definitely not doing the right subject if I wanted to meet women. Still, I had better odds than my father had and they improved each year as the sexism leaked out of the system. ‘I guess I can try to catch him when he leaves . . . If there isn’t a back door.’
John shook his head. Quick as a flash he snatched the woolly hat from my head, revealing my pale baldness and the straggles of dark hair trying to re-establish themselves. He raised his voice. ‘This boy’s got cancer! Let him through!’
Half a dozen faces turned our way.
‘What?’ I hissed at him, trying to recover my hat. ‘Don’t—’
‘Leukaemia! He’s got leukaemia. Get him to a seat.’ John pushed me ahead of him and amazingly the crowd parted as if I had leprosy. We entered at the back of the lecture hall and moved down through an impossibly crowded walkway with John droning, ‘Sick boy coming through.’ He even managed to get a row of already intimate spectators to shuffle still closer and allow me to perch on the end of a bench near the front. I was surprised not to hear a thump as someone at the far end was pushed off into the next walkway.
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