Some Here Among Us (10 page)

‘What do you mean “what are we here for?” We’re here for—’

‘What I mean,’ said Jojo, ‘is why are we here, with him?’

‘Who?’

‘Caspar.’

‘Don’t you like Caspar?’

‘I like Caspar. I’m crazy about Caspar. But I want to see you. I want to be with you. I haven’t seen you for three and a half weeks, twenty-four and a half days, and I look forward to flying in and meeting you and seeing you and here we are out in the middle of nowhere with Caspar and whisky and coffee. I’m jet-lagged, remember. I’ve flown eleven thousand miles. I want to see you and I want to go to sleep.’

‘I thought you’d
like
it,’ said Toby. ‘I thought you’d like doing this. You’ve never been to America really, only LA, and I thought you’d like it driving out here into the country, I thought you’d like to see the Leonids. I mean we could turn round and go straight back to town and creep around the house not waking everyone, though we’d be bound to wake up Mom and Gillian, not to mention Bernard, though he’s stone deaf, and Chip, he’s a whole lot of fun, I can tell you, but if that’s what you want, then we’ll do that.’

‘Well, how do I know if that’s what I want?’ cried Jojo. ‘I’ve never met your mother so how do I know if I want to wake her, though I’ve always wanted to come to Washington and meet your family but that’s hardly
this
, is it,
here
, is it?’

She waved her arm, unseen, at the night.

‘Well it is,’ said Toby, ‘in a way it is, I mean there’s Washington right there’ – he pointed, also unseen, at the light pollution – ‘and here am I, and Caspar more or less grew up at my house—’

‘Oh, Toby, all I wanted was to be alone with you, is that so bad, is that so difficult?’

‘Well, I wanted to be alone with you, too, that’s why I thought of coming straight out here instead of Barleycorn Street with the whole family breathing down our necks, that’s why I asked Caspar for the truck and then he said “Sure,” but then he said “I want to see those meteors too.” So what was I supposed to say? “No, no – I’m taking your truck and you can’t come”? Could I say that? Could I?’

‘I don’t see why not. Why not? Why did you need his truck anyway?’ said Jojo. ‘You’ve got a car. Haven’t you got a car? Why do we need his truck?’

‘Well, I thought we could lie on the flatbed and, you know, look
up
. I thought it would be nice. I thought that would be fun,’ said Toby, but his heart was sinking. Why didn’t he take Candy’s car? he wondered. Why
did
he take the Caspar option? Was Jojo right? Was he secretly avoiding being alone with her? Jojo had accused him before of not loving her – not sufficiently, not intensely, entirely. Was she right? Or was it rather that the more she accused him, the less sure he felt of himself, and then the less he did in fact love her, for causing this uncertainty, this anxiety?

‘
Aha
,’ said Caspar, manifesting himself out of the dark. He leaned in and turned on the cab light. He looked amused. He gave the impression, in fact, of having overheard the conversation between the unhappy lovers. A lesser spirit might have been affronted by what had been said, but Caspar was not. It was not in nature, his expression seemed to say, it was beyond the realms of possibility, that he should be surplus to requirements.

‘Let’s get us comfortable here,’ Caspar said, shining a torch into the back of the pick-up. ‘
Any dam’ nigger can make himself comfortable
. That’s the wisdom my Wesleyan forefathers handed down to me.’

He leapt onto the back of the truck and wrapped a blanket round himself.

‘Where’s these shooting stars anyway?’ he said.

He held out his hand.

Jojo, despite herself so to speak, put one foot on the tow-bar and let Caspar haul her up. Caspar had a gap between his two front top teeth which for some reason added to his air of self-assurance. He was not only amused, his teeth indicated: he knew what to do next. He now lit a marijuana joint and inhaled deeply.

‘This – this – this—’ he said, pointing at the joint while also trying to hold his breath during utterance, ‘is necessary to appreciate the
scale
of the solar system and its – uh – uh – attendant families of – of – of—’

Jojo laughed. Toby felt relieved. There
was
a problem, he thought. He had a problem, they had a problem, but for the immediate moment the problem would not present itself. He unzipped the goose-down bag and put it round Jojo’s shoulders, and then he pumped up an airbed with the plastic hand-pump.

‘Where you folks headin’?’ said Caspar, standing against the night-sky in his blanket. ‘Orstraya? Well, I’ll be doggoned. You have a nice evening in Orstraya, you hear?’

Jojo laughed again. Toby lit the halogen lantern and put it on the roof of the cab. Someone screamed across the dark field. Some teenagers went past in a car with its doors hanging open.

‘Oh, yeah – let me tell you my dream the other night,’ said Caspar. ‘I was in this house in Washington and I saw my watch start to run backwards. Then my beer glass, when I emptied it, filled up of its own accord. “It’s a Scharnhorst variation,” I heard a voice say. “A local, limited backward run of time. Quite rare. Rather interesting.”

‘It had a kind of British accent, this voice. Then there was another one across the street. Another variation, I mean. I can’t remember what it was, but it was a much bigger one. Then I was on an old-style streetcar and we went crashing down the hallway of a house and then we were all sitting down to dinner. That was all right, except it was a Baltimore streetcar and we were in Washington. “Oh well,” said the voice. “It’s the break-up of space-time. It’s the end of the world. But it’s nice to see it being done so well. So . . . British.” ’

There was a pause.

‘Whaddya think?’ said Caspar.

‘Fairly nuts,’ said Toby.

‘Yeah, yeah, but you don’t get it,’ said Caspar. ‘This dream was about
you
. She’s got a British accent.’

‘I have not,’ said Jojo.

‘And you – you got a little twang. I can hear it. You’re turning English on me.’

‘I do not have anything remotely resembling a British accent,’ said Jojo.

‘Remotely resembling,’ said Caspar in a British accent.

‘Cheek,’ said Jojo.

Caspar did not answer. At work as a security guard he had been trialling the use of a motorised scooter. He now saw himself scooting along endless passages of the mall, skimming through the crowds, a head taller than all of them.

‘These shootin’ stars,’ he said dreamily, ‘these shootin’ stars, they were left behind in 1776. These are
American
meteors coming your way tonight, folks.’

‘I don’t follow,’ said Jojo.

‘Well,’ said Caspar. ‘This comet swings by the sun every thirty years, but the debris doesn’t hit us for another couple of hundred. And here comes the 1776 crop of thistles now.’

‘
Oh!
’ went a voice out in the dark as Caspar was speaking.

‘Tempel-Tuttle, that’s the guy who found it,’ said Caspar. ‘Crazy name, crazy guy.’

From different parts of the field people started calling out.

‘
Oooh!
’ they went.

‘
Aaaah!
’

‘Oh, wow,’ said Jojo. ‘
Wow
 . . .’

Out of the constellation of the Lion, the debris of Tempel-Tuttle streamed above them in the night.

3

‘Radial keratotomy,’ said Bernard, ‘is the name of the procedure. As well as that, of course, we used the cryolathe, which freezes the cornea tissue and then lathe-cuts it just as you would cut the lens of a pair of glasses.’

He looked sharply at his listener to make sure she was attending, and also – she had the feeling – to check the state of her corneal tissue. She was a diplomat’s wife. Her name was Heloise. She was a handsome spare-boned woman with black hair drawn back in a – what was the word, Toby wondered – barouche, barrette, barrique? Her husband, the
chargé d’affaires
at the Belgian embassy, sat further down the table. These were the kind of people Chip often found and brought home. He felt that they added lustre to his dinner table, in this case, a Thanksgiving table. Heloise was on Bernard’s right. She felt slightly trapped but she brought all her powers to bear on concealment of the fact. Toby watched Bernard with, as usual, admiration. The poor old nonagenarian who wasn’t quite certain where he was – a displacement Toby didn’t necessarily buy – had vanished. Bernard sat at the head of the table in his excellent grey suit, his cuffs were gleaming, his small, neat head was combed, and gleamed as well, as with a kind of exo-cranial intelligence.

‘Now Voltaire—’ he was saying.

On his other side sat Candy. Also present were: Chip, Toby’s sister Gillian, Jojo, Race, Race’s date from the marine biology department, Chadwick and his wife Laura, Merle and Romulus.

‘Merle is coming for Thanksgiving,’ Candy announced a week before. ‘I have more reason to give thanks for Merle than anyone else on the planet.’

A place was set for Caspar but he hadn’t showed up. It was four in the afternoon. As usual, Toby thought, Candy had got up to some tricks with the seating plans. She loved arranging seating plans. This time she had put Toby next to Race’s date. But why? Only to annoy him, he guessed. He didn’t want to meet Race’s date. He didn’t like Race’s dates. He had never in fact reconciled himself to the divorce of his parents. On the other hand, he didn’t much like seeing Race at Barleycorn Street. He loved his father but on these family occasions there was this forced cheer in the air as if they – Race and Candy – were secretly looking back at something complex and sad and far away. Was it their break-up? Or was it the fact they had married at all? That was a fear of Toby’s.

‘I myself played a part – a small part, but I am pleased to think a useful one,’ said Bernard, ‘in designing the microkeratome, which, as you may know, has an oscillating blade to open a flap in the cornea. At one stage I went to sit at the feet of the illustrious José Barraquer, in Bogotá. Now José was a very odd chap – he adored fish—’

‘Adored what?’ said Heloise.

‘
Fish!
’ said Bernard irritably. ‘But Slava – he was a genius. Slava—’

‘Who is Slava?’ said Heloise.

‘Slava?’ said Bernard. He looked at Heloise sternly. Was the woman mad, or was she just playing games? Everyone in the world knew of Slava Fyodorov who had invented radial keratotomy.

‘It’s all a question,’ he said, ‘of flattening the curvature of the cornea. The funny thing is that Slava discovered the procedure purely by accident—’

Candy and Merle were bringing in the soup. They placed a bowl in front of each guest.

‘
Do
all start,’ said Candy.

Jojo took up her dessert spoon and dipped it in her soup. A flicker passed across Heloise’s face; she raised one eyebrow by less than a millimetre. Then Jojo realised what she had done. Then Gillian took up her dessert spoon and dipped it in her soup as well. Death to tyrants! That was what she meant. Toby loved his sister for that. And the two of
them
could have been sisters, he thought, looking at Gilly and Jojo laughing silently, side by side. He himself was still not getting along with Jojo. There was a freeze in relations. After two nights sleeping in his old bedroom they still had not made love. Strange, he thought. At fourteen, fifteen years old, in that very room hadn’t he, nearly asleep, imagined sumptuous orgies, and now there he was, with a woman a foot away, and he did not know how to cross the space between the two beds. The decals on the wall were the same, and the woven rug with the picture of a brown bear by a waterfall, a friend from childhood, was still on the floor between them.

‘Delicious, the soup,’ said Laura Chadwick. ‘Artichoke, I think.’

‘One of Slava’s patients was a young ruffian who got into a street-fight,’ said Bernard. ‘His glasses were broken and glass pierced his eye. After Slava removed the splinter he found that the patient’s sight had quite improved. A deep radial incision, you see.’

‘I see!’ said Heloise.

‘The last twenty years of my professional life,’ said Bernard, ‘you might say I spent
fine-tuning
the results of a street-brawl in Moscow.’

‘Wonderful,’ said Heloise. ‘How old are you, my dear?’

Bernard did not hear the kindly note of condescension.

‘I am ninety-two years old,’ he said, ‘which is to say, I am in my ninety-third year.’

‘Wonderful!’ said Heloise. ‘It can hardly be credited.’

Bernard basked in the flattery.

‘You may not credit it,’ he said, ‘and I may take no credit.’

‘Your parents also lived to a wonderful age?’

‘My mother and my father both. My father, of course, had the finest physique in the British army. His measurements just about matched the Great Sandow’s, except that Father’s thighs were an inch longer and he was accordingly shorter from knee to ankle. He often wondered if this hip-to-knee length gave him his facility as a horse-rider. He was one of the best riders in the army, you know. He was often mentioned in despatches.’