Lock-ins at The Green Man. I was home. ‘Maisie, don’t lock-ins need the odd night when you actually close at the legal time? And a lock to lock?’
‘Desist your logification right now, Mo! You’re back on Clear now. It’s only sheep, fish and the weather here. Leave your relativity back in Baltimore, if you please. And if John brings his harp I’ll crack open my last bottle of Kilmagoon. Mind how you go.’
‘Mowleen Muntervary, you are an eight-year-old aberration who will be lashed by devils with nettles in hell until your bottom is covered with little lumps that you will scratch until they bleed! Do you want that to happen?’
My memory of Miss Thorpe veers towards an eyebrow mite through an electron microscope. Shiny, spikey, many-eyed. Why are primary schoolteachers either Brontëesque angels or Dickensian witches? Do they teach black and white so much that they become black or white?
‘I asked you a question, and I did not hear an answer! Is it your wish to be damned as a liar?’
‘No, Miss Thorpe.’
‘Then tell me how you got your grubby mitts on the algebra test answers!’
‘I did them myself !’
‘If there is one thing in this world that I loathe more than little boys who fib, it is little girls who fib! I shall be forced to write to your father, telling him that his daughter is a fork-tongued viper! You’re going to be shamed in your own village!’
A toothless threat. No Clear Islander took a non-Gaelic-speaking teacher seriously.
There was a trail of these exposé letters, all the way to Cork Girls’ Grammar School. When my da came back at the weekend he used to read them out to Ma in a funny English accent that crippled us with laughter. ‘It is inconceivable that your daughter scored a hundred per cent in this examination honestly. Cheating is a serious transgression...’
Da was a boatyard contractor who spent the week travelling between Cork and Baltimore, supervising work and dealing with buyers from as far as Dublin. He’d fallen in love with my mother, a Clear Island girl, and was married in St Ciaran’s church by a middle-aged priest called Father Wally.
These days the primary school kids are taught in English and Gaelic in Portacabins down in the harbour. The older ones go on the St Fachtna to a school in Schull that has its own planetarium. Miss Thorpe went to propagate her Manichean principles in poor multi-shafted African countries. Bertie Crow stores hay in the old school house now.
If you look in through the window, that’s what you see: hay.
I told the Texan I would reconsider my resignation over the weekend. I drove to the bank, and withdrew enough US dollars in cash for the manager to invite me into the back office for coffee while they checked me out. Driving back to the chalet, I caught myself glancing into the mirror every fifteen seconds. Paranoia must often begin as a nasty game. I phoned John to ask his advice. ‘A thorny one,’ said John. ‘But should you decide to,’ he switched to Gaelic, ‘take an unscheduled sabbatical, try to get back to Clear for my birthday.’ John usually hid his advice in its wrapping. ‘And remember that I love you very much.’
I packed briefly, and left a note on the table asking Daniella to look after my books and plants. The hardware, like the chalet and the car, belonged to Light Box. I downloaded my hard disks onto the CDs I planned to take, erased everything else, and emptied zoos of my most virulent viruses on the disks I’d leave behind. My farewell present to Heinz.
How do you disappear? I’d made particles disappear, but I’d never disappeared myself. I would have to watch myself through my pursuers’ eyes, find blindspots, and move into those blindspots. I telephoned my usual travel agent, and asked for a flight to Petersburg in three days’ time, no matter the cost, to be paid by credit card. I e-mailed the only web site in Equatorial Guinea, telling them that Operation Cheese was Green. I went out for a stroll, and found a Belgian yoghurt lorry in which to chuck my cylindrical chicken switch.
Then I sat in my window seat and watched the waterfall, as the evening thickened.
When it was dark I began the long drive north on the Berlin autobahn.
I could see the beginning.
The track has wildflowers growing down the middle. ‘Aodhagan Croft’, says the sign, painted by Liam. Another sign swings underneath: ‘home-made ice cream’, painted by me. Planck dozes in the late sun. The windows in the house are open. The yellow sou’wester in the porch, the watering can, Planck’s lead and harness, the wellington boots, the rows of herb pots. John comes out of the house: he hasn’t heard me yet. I walk to the vegetable garden. Feynman sees me, and bleats through his beard. Schroedinger leaps onto the mailbox to get a better view. Planck thumps her tail a couple of times before getting up to bark. Lazy tyke.
My journey ends here. I am out of west to run to.
John turns. ‘Mo!’
‘Who else are you expecting, John Cullin?’
A latch clicks in the murk and I fold upright and where the hell am I? I slip and judder. What ceiling, what window? Huw’s? The poky hotel in Beijing? The Amex Hotel in Petersburg, is there a ferry to catch? Helsinki? The black book! Where’s the black book! Slowly now Mo, slowly... you’ve forgotten something, something secure. The rain drumming on the glass, fat fingertips of European rain. The smooth edges, unclutteredness, the windchime, you recognise that windchime, don’t you, Mo? The bruises down your side are still aching, but aching with healing. A man downstairs is singing Van Morrison’s ‘The way young lovers do’ in a way that only one man you know sings Van Morrison, and it definitely isn’t Van Morrison.
I felt happiness that I’d forgotten the feel of.
And there’s the black book on the dressing table, where you put it last night.
On John’s side of the bed was a John-shaped hollow. I rolled into it, the cosiest place on Earth. I twitched open the curtain with my toe. A sulky sky, not worth getting up for yet.
When did I become so jittery? That night I left for Berlin? Or is it just getting old, my organs getting fussier, until one of them says ‘I quit!’ I belly-flopped back into the shallows of sleep. A lonely horn sounded, from one of my ma’s gramophone records, a cargo ship out in the Celtic Sea, a memory junk across Kowloon harbour. We rounded the west cape of Sherkin Island, my black book and I, and after a trip of twelve thousand miles I could see the end. Would they be waiting here? They let me get this far. No, I got this far myself. The pillow of John, John the pillow, St John, hemp, smoke, mahogany sweat and deeper fruits deeper down, my heart jolting, hauling carriages, grasslands rising and falling, years and years of them, Custard from Copenhagen, inured to loneliness, gazing out of the window, I wonder what happened to him, I wonder what happened to all of them, this wondering is the nature of matter, each of us a loose particle, an infinity of paths through the park, probable ones, improbable ones, none of them real until observed whatever real means, and for something so solid matter contains terrible, terrible, terrible expanses of nothing, nothing, nothing...
Technology is repeatable miracles. Air travel, for instance. Thirty thousand feet below our hollow winged nail, it’s early morning in Russia. A track runs snowy hills and black lakes, drawn with a wonky ruler.
My fellow passengers are oblivious to the forces that infuse matter and carry thought. They don’t know how our Boeing 747’s velocity increases our mass and slows time, while our distance from the Earth’s gravitational centre has speeded up time, relative to those asleep in the farmhouses we are passing over. None has heard of quantum cognition.
I can’t sleep. My skin feels stretched and saggy. I bring my calculator onto airplanes to pass the time. It’s a chunky one that Alain borrowed from the Paris lab. It can do a quintillion decimal places. To pass the time I work out the odds of us three hundred and sixty passengers all being here. Long odds. It takes me all the way to Kyrgistan.