Anything to distract me from the near future.
A Chinese schoolgirl on her way back to Hong Kong is asleep next to me. She is around the age when lucky young women transform into beautiful swans. At her age Mo Muntervary transformed into a spotty gannet. Now I’m a wrinkled gannet. A dinosaur movie is on the screen, scaley violence in silence. My throat is dry with recycled air. I feel a headache coming on. Cryptish lighting, orthodontic decor. Where is the sun, which way is the world spinning? And what the hell have I got myself into?
The second time I awoke, footsteps vibrated the plank of sleep. I knew exactly where I was this time. How long? Two minutes or two hours? Real footsteps, running on gravel, measured and bold, with a right to be here. I lifted the curtain by an eighth of an inch, and I saw a young man jogging through a tunnel of drizzle straight to Aodhagan.
Stone the crows. My son is a man. I felt proud and piqued. His duffle coat swung open. Dark jeans, boots, his father’s uncontrollable hair. Feynman stared from his paddock, munching, and Planck jumped up, wagging.
‘Mo!’ John shouted from down below. ‘It’s Liam!’
A door banged. Liam still closes doors like a baby elephant.
I put on John’s bat-cloak dressing gown. ‘I’m coming down! And John?’
‘What?’
‘Happy birthday, you scabby pirate!’
‘I’ve never had a better one!’
Huw opened the door and gave me a hug, munching a Chinese radish. ‘Mo! You got here! Sorry I couldn’t meet you at the airport... If John had given me a little more warning, I’d have rescheduled my day.’
‘Hello, Huw. It was plain sailing until I got to your building. I thought the fourth floor meant the third floor. Or the third, the fourth. Anyway, your neighbour put me right.’
‘Hong Kong’s never quite sure of itself. British or American or Chinese numbering, even I still get muddled. Come in, put down your bag, have some tea and a bath.’
‘Huw. I don’t know how to thank you for this.’
‘Nonsense. Us Celts have got to stick together. You’re my first house-guest, we’ll have to make things up as we go along. Come and inspect your quarters. Not a patch on your chalet, I’m afraid—’
‘My ex-employer’s chalet—’
‘Your ex-employer’s chalet. Here you are! Chez Mo. Cramped and messy, but it’s yours, and unless the CIA has cockroaches on its payroll they’ll never find you.’
‘In my limited experience the CIA has a lot of cockroaches on its payroll.’
The room was no more cramped or messy than fifty labs I’d worked in. There was a sofabed ready for me to crash on, bless Huw, a desk, stacks of books that would bury me with one mild earth tremor, and a vase of flamingo orchids. ‘The lavatory’s through there, if you stand on it and twist your neck around you get a cracking view of Kowloon harbour.’
It was as humid as a launderette. Hives of life rumbled on the other sides of the floor, walls and ceiling. The tenement across the alley was so close that our window frames seemed to share the same glass. Trains grinded, little things scuttled, and somewhere a giant bicycle pump was cranking itself up and hissing itself down.
The life of a conscience-led scientist. ‘It’s perfect, Huw. Can I use your computer?’
‘Your computer,’ insisted Huw.
The fire in the kitchen hearth wheezed and popped. Liam and I looked at one another, suddenly at a loss. The tiles chilled my toes. I’d polished this reunion for so long, but now I could only gawp. I remembered baby goblin Liam, I remembered the adolescent mutant he’d been last summer with bumfluff on his top lip, and I saw the raffish man he’d make in a decade or two. As well-summered as you can get in Dublin, his hair was gelled, he’d got an ear stud and his jaw was squatter.
‘Mam—’ his voice had become a bassoon.
‘Liam—’ I said at exactly the same time, my voice a flautist’s mistake.
‘Oh for the love of God you two,’ muttered John.
It was suddenly all right and Liam was hugging me first and hardest. I hugged back harder and until we both groaned, but that wasn’t why I wanted to cry. ‘You’re supposed to be at Uni, you malingerer. Who gave you permission to grow so much in my absence?’
‘Ma, who gave you permission to do a James Bond god-knows-where in my absence? And who did that to your eye?’
I looked at John around Liam’s shoulder. ‘You have a point. I’m sorry. A knight in shining armour did this to my eye. I forgave him. He’d knocked me out of the path of a taxi.’
‘“A point”, she calls it Da, you hear that?’
I karate-chopped his sides.
‘Don’t I get an apology too?’ whinged John.
‘Shut up, Cullin,’ I said, ‘you’re only the father and you don’t have any rights.’
‘I’ll just go and blunder off a cliff then and leave you two to it.’
‘Happy birthday! Da! Sorry I couldn’t get back last night. I stayed at Kevin’s in Baltimore.’
‘Blame your ma. She only phoned from London yesterday morning.’
‘I can’t do anything to her. She’s bearhugging me.’
‘You just have to wait until it passes.’
I let Liam go. ‘Off with your coat and sit by the fire. The fog’s made you clammy. And don’t tell me those ridiculous spaceman trainers keep your feet dry. Now tell me about university. Is Knyfer McMahon still Faculty Head? What are you doing for your first-year thesis?’
‘No, Ma, no! I haven’t seen you for half a year, with only your voice on tapes. Where have you been and what have you been doing? Tell her, Da!’
‘John Cullin, did you teach our son to answer back to his elders and betters?’
‘You just have to wait until it passes. Anyway, I’m only the father. Tea?’
Liam sniffed. ‘Please.’
Planck was still running around in nervous wagging circles.
In my first week in Hong Kong, I did very little. I got lost and unlost and lost in byways and overways and underways. A quarter of the world, teeming in a few square miles. Huw was right. If I avoided computer link-ups I was probably untraceable. But after Switzerland I felt I had crash-landed on a strange planet where privacy and peace were coincidences rather than rights. ‘Dispense with the niceties,’ advised Huw, ‘and learn to do inside your head what you can’t do outside.’
I got a fake British passport made, for only fifty US dollars.
I watched the television war. I watched the weaponry analysed, hyped and billed: Scud versus Homer, Batman versus the Joker. The war had been ‘won’ days before, the supply of cheap oil secured, but that was no longer the point. Technology efficacy needed to be tested in combat conditions, and to use up stockpiles. The wretched army of conscripts from the enemy’s ethnic minorities were the laboratory rats. Quancog’s laboratory rats. My laboratory rats.
I recorded a tape of me and Hong Kong, and posted it to John, via Siobhan in Cork, John’s Aunt Triona in Baltimore, Billy, Father Wally and thus to John. I prayed it would get through undetected, a snail invisible to radar.
Huw was suddenly dispatched to Petersburg, so there I was: alone, unknown, unemployed, a box of hundred-dollar notes concealed in the freezer compartment under bags of peas. My escape plan had worked too well. No kidnapper from phantom crime networks so much as dropped in for a chat. Had the Texan just been bluffing? Trying to scare me to Saragosa?
Now what?
We create models to explain nature, but the models wind up gatecrashing nature and driving away the original inhabitants. In my lecturing days most of my students believed that atoms really are solid little stellar nuclei orbited by electrons. When I tell them that nobody knows what an electron is, they look at me like I’ve told them that the sun is a watermelon. One of the better read-up ones might put up their hand and say, ‘But Dr Muntervary, isn’t an electron a charged probability wave?’