SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (14 page)

'Nova
was the word Galileo used.
Nova stella,
a new star. He saw one in
16
04. A novel light off there in the firmament, to be riddled and equated and named. But we have made distinctions he'd never even dreamt of, so we have added
super
-
nova.
Which isn't a new star at all, of course, but a dying one. The manifestation in the visible spectrum of an apocalyptic terminus. Something so vast its distance is an integral part of its perception, and we arrive along with the belated shower of light to write its obituary. The life of stars, you see. Your life in the stars. And it's true: the horoscopists have a point after all. We are made out of material which a celestial body provided, cooked in the fire of its mighty collapse. We're all of us stars really. We've all blazed with light up there in our time. It wasn't only Elvis shining in his sequin suit as we bent our necks to catch him. We've all been brilliant up there once, however dull we've become in the interim down here since.

'This one in the picture they call
19
87 A. It fair takes your breath away, doesn't it, the mystical soul of the modem astronomer. Confronted by one of the most imponderable events ever perceived by humankind, the unmistakable flash and blaze of fate in the heavens, our contemporary mental cosmonaut reaches deep into his innermost region and announces this rubric to his litany:
19
87
A.
Remark the lyricism that engulfs him when he finally encounters wonder.
I
..
9..8..7.
And A of course. Don't forget alpha, the birth-letter to which our supernova constitutes an omega.
19
87
A.
Maybe it sounds better chanted in Aramaic. Who knows, it might describe an occult harmony, a Pythagorean cave hidden deep in the psyche. Or it might be simply another postscript to the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.'

He stopped there and looked out carefully as though trying to fathom whether or not their eyes might have started to glaze. How many little dead stars off there in the lecture hall, as the scientist plays Copemicus to the elliptical orbits of their attention? These our revels now are ended, Sylvie thought. Time to switch off the projector, Tom. Time for coffee. Time to leave the universe. Or was it to rejoin it?

'It was excellent,' she said as she poured him his coffee. 'No photons, no images. The miniaturisation of reality.'

'They often take their time arriving. I'm interested in your work, what I've heard of it. How about a drink some time?'

'Fine. Check your diary and give me a ring.' She tried to remember whether or not he was married. There'd been that bit about the head on the pillow that had once filled you with hope. He was tall and blond and attractive, though perhaps a little too aware of the fact. He liked to put it about a bit, didn't he? Alison had told her about him. Said he wasn't to be trusted; there'd been some trouble with a student. Might make a change from tall dark Owen, all the same, or small greying Henry, wouldn't it? We're only talking about a drink, for God's sake. Still, you'd better decide what you're going to do in life, girl, or you might find you're already doing it before any decision gets made. And what would Daddy have had to say about that?

The Memory Book

He ordered a pint and sat down next to two middle-aged men, sitting before their drinks with that curious British demeanour of stoicism in the face of the task that lies ahead. Half of the pint gone; only another half to go. We can get there. As Owen was opening the book, the man nearest to him spoke.

'You remember those signs that used to say
PLEASE TAKE YOUR RUBBISH
HOME WITH
YOU?'

'
Mmm
.'

'My daughter appears to have taken that rather literally.

Which is why I'm about to acquire a primitive hunter-gatherer for a son-in-law. Encountered on a caravan site, I believe.'

'What does he do?'

'Drugs.'

Owen was already turning back the pages of the book inside himself. He was aware that there was a sensation growing. It wasn't a memory, not yet, because it wasn't fully focused yet. It might have been a memory once; it would be again. Before very long, he suspected. At the moment it was a region of darkness, growing in intensity. Does darkness have intensity, or is that only light? He couldn't remember. Have to ask
Johnny
,
Johnny
knew all about optics. He kept turning the pages, as though looking for a title. There seemed to be many illustrations of the different shapes memory had travelled under: Plato's wax tablet, a house with different rooms, each one filled with its own accoutrements, palaces, abbeys, ceaseless hunger, and the derangement it was now beginning to suffer from lack of physical contact with any other creatures, human or canine, none of this signified anything whatsoever to the little girl. Which was why, when the back door was inadvertently left open late one afternoon, she tottered out and kept walking on her stout little legs until she came within the chain's growling circle.

Martin held the paper before Henry and Henry looked at the photograph. She'd needed eighty-seven stitches to sew her head back up and stop it from leaking blood the way a smashed tomato in the road bleeds juices. There was still a query hovering over her survival. The dog without a name had already been destroyed. Mr Patel was in the process of being charged with wanton cruelty to a domestic animal, and there was now no more barking in the night along the avenue. Henry continued to stare at the photograph in silence, long after Martin had gone, leaving the paper with him.

Henry sometimes wondered if there might have been a change of lighting - in the world, he meant, not in his gallery. In there the lighting was exactly the same as it has been the day he moved in: a little dim unless the sun shone through one of the crooked windows. But he thought it might have grown fractionally darker outside. He only caught fragments of the news, but it seemed that people over the world
had taken to mass slaughter with a fresh enthusiasm. We were all off again, it seemed. Fate's appetite for flesh was as strong as ever.

He went and sat in the Picasso Room. The eyes of the minotaur were on him. They were all hungry, that was for sure, but for what? What would their food be this time?
cathedrals, a computer, a holo
graph, a palimpsest, an archae
ological dig, Freud's magical writing pad, and, over and over again, a labyrinth. Was there a minotaur sitting at the heart of this fucking labyrinth then, or only Henry Allardyce with a glass of red wine? He closed the book and sat staring at the bar. Something was about to arrive and he knew it.

*

Sylvie put the video Ali had given her into its machine. A young girl was walking up and down, or trying to. Her legs were bent out of shape, and her gait was a constant battle not to fall over. As sh
e struggled a voice-over began.

You
have
I
00,000
goes at it before you get it right.
Then
your mind stores that particular manoeuvre
-
left leg up as right leg goes down again
-
and you stop falling
over.
That's fine.
You’re
only twelve months old. You have all the time in the world and energy to
burn
.

But what if you're not twelve months, but twelve years old, and your legs still don't work right?
They
never have.
You
never walk farther than a hundred metres.
You
go
to school in a wheelchair. And you don't have energy to bum because you're already burning up far too much of it to force your body through the irregular movements that constitute your abnormal gait? What then?

Still the little girl struggled up and down, this way then that.
This
little girl's bipedal
locomotion
is so
poor that she never walks far.
We
view her on a video. What can we do?
The
girl has splints, but she doesn't like wearing them. In the trade
we
call this 'non-compliance'; it's far from uncommon.
The
splints are large, and hardly fashionable. Physiotherapy? We're doing that, but it won't make much difference. Surgery
is
possible, but the parents are unenthusiastic. Results are not guaranteed and the scarring would be permanent.

What
is
our narrative of expectation? That's all about the expenditure of energy, which in a precise sense
is
the 'cost' of this disability. It
is
surely an oddity of human history how often
we
come to
understand ourselves as a result of studying our own creations. These days we negotiate neuroscience by comparing the functioning of a computer with that of a brain. In the nineteenth century we studied the steam engines we had built,
so
as to maximise their efficiency. What did any system do with the energy put into it? It converted some into work, the rest it lost. Whenever a steam engine transmitted heat to its surroundings it was losing energy, which in a machine of perfect efficiency it would have turned into work instead. Such studies led to the formulation of the laws of thermodynamics. And we can look at the body as a system of energy conversion in the same way. Statistics tell us the approximate amount of energy you should be expending by walking. If your legs have been buckled since
in
fancy
then this amount will show as much higher than normal. Everything costs too much. Daily life
is
simply too expensive. And it will get more expensive the older the girl gets.

And then there was no more voice-over, only the film of the little girl making her painful and ungainly way up and down the lab, this way and that, with legs buckled too far out of shape for their purpose. The persistence of vision, the afterlife of images. Sylvie watched it in silence.

Euland

As Sylvie began the long incline that pointed down towards the Birkenhead Tunnel, she was listening to that tape of Paul Darcy which her student had lent her. The song, in a minor key, achieved some curious effects by combining unexpected instruments.
There was an acoustic guitar, a soprano sax:

There's been an earthquake in the Philippines, a
flash flood
in
NYC