Chemistry and Other Stories

by Tim Pears

  I had my headlights on, the windscreen wipers on full. After a mile or two we passed a filling station, and then a shopping centre with a supermarket, a pet emporium, a computer warehouse. We drove past a golf course. Two figures wandered across the rain-drenched fairways. You could see that even if, for a moment, you’d been at the centre of things, all around you life had carried on.

  Until now, Sara had said nothing since nodding her assent to me between our tents an hour or two earlier. She was drying her hair with a towel, and then she said, ‘I am so grateful.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Believe me.’

  ‘So relieved not to be there any more. I mean, how could it not get much, much worse?’

  ‘They’ll have a fine time. You’ll see.’

  ‘They’ll take a lot more drugs.’

  ‘I just couldn’t,’ I said.

  ‘Cal won’t stop,’ Sara said, exasperation and affection coexisting in her voice.

  ‘What you’ve done,’ I said, ‘is make time out of nothing.’

  I sensed Sara turn towards me. I dared not take my own eyes off the ill-visible road.

  ‘I’ll get you back to London,’ I continued, ‘by … what time is it? … by nine. You’ll have the rest of this evening and the whole of tomorrow when you thought you’d be away. No commitments. Nobody knows where you are. No obligations. You can do whatever you want.’

  I told her of the time a year or so before when Jen and myself and our children were going away for the weekend. Some family occasion. The children had been sick that week. My wife and I bickered packing the car, the children took it in turns to sulk or whine, we left too late and drove too fast along the road out of town. Jen slowed down, pulled over, switched off the engine. ‘We don’t need to go,’ she said. ‘Call. Tell them we’re ill. Couldn’t we? And just go home.’

  We spent the next morning lounging around and then, replenished, had a wonderful weekend, doing things we were usually too busy to do. Even as I told Sara this story, I was unable to explain why I was doing so.

  ‘You’re right,’ Sara said, nodding, looking ahead. ‘It’s the same. We can do whatever we want.’

  We, I thought, but said nothing. I had the feeling, in the long pause that followed, that the light changed inside the car: as if a spectre of sunshine made it weakly through the rain. The vehicle hurtled forward, but inside it all was utterly still.

  Sara eventually turned to me. ‘I can’t let you go home,’ she said. ‘Without a hot bath, a meal. Look at you: those ridiculous bags on your feet.’ You can hear someone’s smile in an alteration of tone. ‘A change of clothing. You can wear Cal’s.’ Sara laughed softly. ‘Anything you like.’ Her lovely laugh, suggestive of some subtlety beyond the obvious meaning. I’d always had the feeling Cal never quite got it.

  We competed for a while over things people could do in London on an unexpectedly free Sunday. Given that I’d left the capital ten years before, it wasn’t surprising that Sara came up with more than me. There were hardly any cars on the M4 heading east, into town. The rain swayed lazily over the empty lanes. Yellow headlights flickered across the central reservation.

  We drove along the flyover, past the company towers and the office blocks, coming into Chiswick. ‘Could you roll me a cigarette?’ I asked.

  The rain was slackening off, the sky becoming lighter just as this long summer day drew on into evening. I switched off the windscreen wipers. On either side of the road ahead, like a series of blank screens coming to life, the grey windows of the office blocks began to reflect streaks of gold, and glints of silver, breaking through the clouds. I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw a patch of turquoise sky behind us. I hoped that our friends were happy there, dancing in the mud, dancing in the twilight.

  ***

  There was a vacant parking space a few yards along the pavement from Cal and Sara’s front door, off Holland Park Avenue. I hauled Sara’s stuff out of the boot and carried it up the steps. She found her keys, and unlocked the door.

  ‘Come on, then,’ she said, heading into the hallway.

  ‘I won’t stay,’ I said. Sara turned. ‘I’ll get on home.’

  ‘But I thought … ’ Sara said. She looked genuinely disappointed, though it’s probable I flatter myself to think so. Then she appeared to tremble with swift resolve. ‘You think you’ll be welcome home like that?’ She was right. I was filthy, smelly and still a little spaced out.

  Sara smiled at me. At the same impossibilities that I did. I stepped forward and we hugged briefly, fiercely. ‘Take care,’ she whispered.

  ‘You too,’ I said, before retreating to the car.

  Driving up the M40 in the dark, I smoked the cigarette Sara had rolled me. The radio said the rain would be heavy again towards morning. It was nearly nine p.m. I wouldn’t have been surprised if at this very moment Jen was failing to usher any of our children to bed; in my absence, indulging them. My guess was that she’d be embroiled on the sofa, the little trio in their pyjamas, watching some old video. Suddenly I wanted more than anything to be but a mile away, driving home, about to surprise them. About to squeeze my way into the scrum of my family, my wife and children who would wriggle and object and make room for me somehow, and let me watch the rest of the tape with them, the smallest on my lap, our blood-filled limbs tight packed together. This, more than anything. I rolled down the window and scattered the rest of the tobacco on the damp tarmac, wondering whether I could make it.

  Chemistry

  Elizabeth Mitchell admired her only son. Twenty-seven years old, he resided at present in Kraków, to which he’d moved from Berlin six months before, when Poland joined the EU. He could speak a little of the language already, he told her in the email; he rented a small house, with a little orchard garden, in a quiet suburb, and so long as he was flexible there was work to be had, a living made. It was tantamount to an invitation to visit – at least Liz took it so, knowing him as she did, and she booked a week’s holiday from her job as a receptionist at the doctor’s surgery on Beaumont Street.

  Andrew’s father was less impressed by their son’s ‘vagabond existence’. ‘Waste of an education,’ he lamented. ‘Of a perfectly good brain.’ John was a historian, who’d made his name unearthing the lives of yeomen and peasants from the substratum of recorded history; when working at home he would emerge from his study and blink in surprise at the wife and son and daughter sharing his house, like some earlier Oxford bachelor don caught in a time warp, until he would shake his head and utter, ‘How was school today … Andrew? Sophie?’

  John had hardly registered the struggle Andrew underwent to overcome his shyness. The child would look away when spoken to, unable to sustain eye contact even with his mother. In the presence of other people Andrew was uncomfortable, disturbed, on the brink of flight or tears. Blushing, words came awkwardly from his mouth. He was only happy in his own company, in the garden or the house, untroubled inside his head. Through the years at Wolvercote Primary and then Cherwell School Liz witnessed Andrew suffer – slowly interact, make odd friends; come to terms with human beings – as a parent is accorded the pain and privilege of doing. He survived in the hubbub, making the effort every day to do so, for which Liz admired her son enormously.

  ‘Ryanair?’

  ‘EasyJet,’ Liz told her daughter. ‘Twenty-seven pounds each way. Ridiculous.’

  ‘Plus taxes,’ Sophie said.

  ‘I mean ridiculous how cheap it is.’

  ‘Where from? Stansted?’

  ‘Luton.’

  ‘Exactly how,’ Sophie demanded, ‘are you going to get from Oxford to Luton? Can’t see you on the coach, Mother.’ A sneer evident even down the telephone line. ‘You’ll be getting Daddy to drive you, I presume.’

  ‘Actually, I’m not,’ Liz said, her jaw clenching. ‘I’m going to take the Fiat, and leave it in the car park.’

  ‘Ha,’ said Sophie. ‘You see? I bet that’s costing you like a hundred quid. Am I right or wrong?’


  Liz had spent three hours on the internet the night before, securing the cheapest flight to Kraków, and Sophie was supposed to share her mother’s indignation at the insanity of low-cost air travel.

  ‘Cheap flights are a myth,’ she said instead. ‘Everyone knows of someone else who flew to Rome for fifteen pence. No one’s actually done it.’ Sophie gave a peremptory chuckle, a snort without humour. ‘There’s one born every minute.’

  When Liz turned the handset off she could feel it slippery in her grasp, could feel her heart pounding. She noticed two envelopes beside the base, addresses in John’s spidery scrawl.

  ‘You want these posting?’ she called out. The ensuing silence was a lengthy one, but Liz knew to wait, while John’s brain assimilated her syllables through the barriers of his concentrating mind.

  ‘Please,’ he called back from far away, and Liz was out of the front door. She walked round the corner into Banbury Road, up the short distance to the roundabout, and then across North Way at the double set of pelican crossings. The summer evening was warm but overcast, the atmosphere humid with rumour of rain. She removed her cardigan and wrapped it around her waist. Her daughter annoyed her; she annoyed herself. Traffic noise, from the northern bypass and the interconnecting dual carriageway to the A34, drummed and rumbled in the air, and Liz let it have its peculiar effect upon her: the noise wrapped her mind as if in some coarse but cushioning fibre. She crossed Five Mile Drive and carried on towards the small lake. Tethered to stakes on suburban lawns and floating on the dark grey water were tiny boats, like toys. Her mind became calm, thoughts drifted from it, as she made the loop around Linkside Avenue and back past the lake, and continued the circuit of her walk towards Woodstock Road.

  Sophie was two years younger than Andrew. How different from each other a brace of siblings could be. The girl spoke without thinking, squeaked and squawled, a single-handed disruption of a studious household. She struck up conversations with strangers – the odder the better – on railway station platforms, crowded beaches. Sophie threw herself into everything Andrew shrank away from. She was always running into things; she had no brakes. While Andrew’s childhood was a slow, painful negotiation with society, Sophie’s was a drama. She fell out with the friends she made too easily. Liz was obliged to listen to other parents and teachers complaining, offering advice.

  Brother and sister had little in common. Forced to spend time together Andrew and Sophie rubbed each other the wrong way, bickered, fought. Each seemed to look down upon the other. As far as possible, they avoided one another.

  Things grew worse during Sophie’s teenage years. She became lost in the large comprehensive which John insisted their children attend. Her disruptions became quieter, bleaker, more often against herself. She fell in with fellow misfits, smoked dope, binged or starved herself. Turned on her own skin. The promiscuity of her childhood friendships transferred easily to shifting boys.

  One day John, glancing up from his morning post, blinked and said, ‘What on earth is that thing doing in your nose?’ He peered over his spectacles. ‘This is north Oxford, Sophie, not Papua New Guinea.’

  Less than a week later they were milling in the hallway, making ready to leave for their various destinations, when Andrew said, ‘Tell her to open her mouth.’

  Sophie invited her brother to shut his own, and stormed out of the front door. But soon enough her father saw the stud embedded in her fourteen-year-old tongue. He said nothing.

  It was like living, Liz thought, with a saboteur, of Sophie’s own life and of those around her; a familiar stranger who regarded residing with her family as a form of house arrest. They were grim years, every crisis a forbidding one, Liz obliged to intervene repeatedly: Sophie saw counsellors, GPs, a psychiatrist; she took medication as an occasional necessity. Liz’s every intervention met with hateful resentment. Sophie’s GCSEs were retaken and scraped through, A levels too, and a further gap year was spent dossing around Oxford. Sophie finally left for Bournemouth with, as John put it, ‘two A levels, one abortion, a psychotic episode and a criminal record for supplying her friends with dried mushrooms. A promising start.’

  Liz felt only numb relief. It seemed to her that the store of maternal love she’d been allotted for her daughter had never replenished itself, and was now exhausted. Still, she kept in contact, with cards, phone calls, emails. She welcomed Sophie home – her wayward daughter and the two distant men, father and brother, would have drifted apart, she was sure – but it was duty that made her do so.

  Sophie more or less passed her photography degree, and lived here and there along the south coast. Summers she spent on the road and at festivals, with travellers in trucks, an old ambulance, once a horse-drawn caravan. As far as Liz could gather, her daughter performed, rarely the same thing twice: singing, acting, juggling. ‘Our all-round entertainer,’ John called her. She dropped in on Oxford occasionally. The last time, in March, Liz was struck by lines in her twenty-five-year-old daughter’s face; inflicted, she assumed, by the drugs, and by the summer sun and wind. But she was calmer. The chemical volatility of her youth gradually settling itself.

  Shortly before six-thirty, after Elizabeth had returned from her walk, as John was mixing the gin and tonics with which they began a Friday evening, he remarked upon the irony of both his children choosing to become, despite the comparative privilege of their upbringing, modern members of the economic underclass he studied.

  ‘I know,’ Liz said.

  John frowned, as he cut the lemon. ‘It’s an irony I find harder to enjoy than certain others might.’

  ‘Andrew won’t be working in bars and building sites forever.’

  John placed the glass on a coaster on the table beside Liz. ‘You see great things ahead?’ he asked.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. She would not rise to the bait. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘I look forward to a progress report.’

  Liz scrabbled a handful of salted peanuts from the bowl. ‘I’ll give him your love,’ she said.

  John surely knew she would, if he ever considered the matter.

  Liz gathered fruit in the orchard of the Polish house. Apples, pears, damsons. It was the middle of August. If she used all her weight she could shake the trunk of a tree from which ripe plums fell, sweet and juicy. The weather was hot and sweaty but not unpleasantly so in the shade of the fruit trees. She made the mistake of going barefoot, once, and was stung by a wasp gorging on the fallen fruit: the precise pain took Liz back almost fifty years, to the garden she’d grown up in, an only child, in a north Oxfordshire village.

  There were still a few blackcurrants and raspberries on the bushes here, blackberries coming into season. Walnuts green on a wide-spreading tree.

  The house, one half of which Andrew rented, was in Bielany, once a village, now an outlying suburb of Kraków, not far from the small airport Liz flew into. Andrew, behind the barrier, held a sign, ‘Mrs Mitchell’, his lips twisted in that wry, reticent grin of his, disguised a little now by a wispy beard. His embrace, too, was unchanged: awkward, non-committal, but she hugged him to her all the same, till she had the feel of his flesh, and the smell of him again.

  He took her sightseeing, things she guessed he wouldn’t do, had not done, himself – just as, after all, she did with visitors to Oxford. They took a tour of the centre of Kraków in a fancy horse-drawn wagon. Its wheels were covered in rubber strips. The driver was a paunchy, red-faced drinker, much younger, she realised, than he first appeared. Every now and again he would turn from his seat in front of and above them, point to whichever church they were passing, and announce, ‘Saint Peter and Saint Paul. Seventeen century.’ His pair of horses ambled calmly along their familiar route. ‘Saint Andrew. Thirteen century.’

  ***

  Liz ate fruit from the garden for breakfast, with yoghurt and honey. The restaurants offered wholesome food: meat or fish, potatoes or dumplings. Andrew ordered for her. He didn’t look the waiter or waitress in the eye but his accent sounded pretty
much like theirs. ‘Proposze pstrag ruszt, ziemniaki i surowke … Prosze … Piwo.’

  They chinked glasses.

  ‘Cheers, Mum.’

  ‘I could have sworn,’ she said, ‘you weren’t a beer drinker.’

  ‘I wasn’t. Back home. Warm beer tasting like soap. But out here.’ He held up the slim glass of brown liquid. ‘At the end of a hot summer’s day.’ Andrew took a cool throatful and swallowed, murmuring his pleasure. Liz had a sense of the small liberations of exile. She asked him what work he had.

  ‘I’m writing,’ Andrew said and grinned lopsidedly. His mother used to encourage his school compositions, stories. ‘You’re a natural observer,’ she used to tell him. ‘You’re a natural writer.’ Yes, he observed other people, keenly as an animal; he did it to survive. He shook his head. ‘No. It’s commercial crap, Mum. With EU membership, organisations need their written material – advertising, PR stuff – in English.’

  ‘You translate?’

  ‘No. Someone else, I mean Poles, translate the content. What I do’s polish their English.’

  It occurred to Liz that she’d enjoy telling John of Andrew’s progression from physical to intellectual work, however modest: proof of her faith in her son. It was the only time she thought of her husband during the holiday.

  Andrew worked at night. Liz slept on a divan, made up with ill-fitting sheets and blanket, in the sitting room. She was woken intermittently, by guard dogs tethered in the gardens of the neighbourhood, barking to each other, and by the cloc of pears dropping on the tiled roof of the old barn. In the mornings she picked fruit while Andrew slept. There were yellow apples she quartered, cut out the cores: within moments the white flesh began to discolour.

  After her solitary breakfast, Liz, armed with a local map, took a brisk walk. Many new houses had been built in the orchards of older ones, infilling here just as in the gardens of north Oxford. When she passed other people no one acknowledged her. She enjoyed greeting them with the two words she knew, ‘Dzien dobry.’ The middle-aged and elderly were startled to be addressed by a stranger, and muttered something back; young Poles seemed far more friendly. Such, Liz admitted, were the judgements of a cursory traveller.