The Start of Everything (15 page)

“What are you looking at?” This was Chao. He unlocked his cabinet and chose from among the dozen small boxes of American cereals he keeps in there. This one had coloured marshmallows in, and a cartoon leprechaun on the box. He used Ainsley’s milk.

I patted down my hair. I pulled it over my ears, but the earrings were in my pocket. “Nothing,” I said. I didn’t want another lecture. I looked at myself in the toaster. I’d chewed off my lipstick, and mascara had rubbed off under my eyes.

Down the stairs. In my room, I laid my books out all over the bed so that I couldn’t give up and lie down.

I got the lecture notes out of my bag. There were three problems to work out for tomorrow’s supervision. The camera outside my window changed position. Below, the music from the college bar pulsed. The rhythm lulled me. I tilted my desk lamp to hurt my eyes a little.

My head bobbed to the music, hitting my chin against the thin gold chain my grandmother had given me.

I’d never told her that I was tired or bored or desperate to do anything else besides read to her. My only excuse to ever leave was “I have to study now, Gran.” She understood that. She was so proud of me.

I’d been the one to find her, on a Sunday morning this past summer holiday. It had happened in her sleep. I don’t know how it is I told the difference between rest and absence, but she was cold. I knew that without touching her.

Mum and Shep had been married three years but never had a honeymoon. Gran lived with us, and everything had been scheduled around her care. Mum is a whiz at organizing, and put the funeral together with the same practicality and detail with which she’d kept
Gran alive. Then she put her hand to a round-the-world itinerary for her and Shep. There had been enough in the life insurance to help me with uni and give Mum and Shep this treat. She had a photo place make me a calendar of pictures of where they’d be every month. Because she made it before they left, the photos were impersonal and iconic, symbols of places. I looked up. November: Australia. The fruit-segment shapes of the Sydney Opera House stuck out a bridge like it was a tongue.

I tried it out: “I have to study now, Gran.” But I couldn’t trick myself. Gran didn’t need us anymore; we could do anything. Mum could go to Australia. I could stay late at a pub.

I pushed the books to the side of the bed and stretched out on it. The desk lamp lit my empty chair. The song downstairs changed.
“Baby, yeah,”
I joined in. It didn’t mean anything; it was just an excuse for a good beat.
“Uh, uh, uh,”
I sang. I kicked off my shoes. I curled up, arms across my chest, knees to elbows. I shut my eyes. I could do whatever I wanted.

There’s a path from the Bursar’s Garden into the Master’s Garden that you’d never guess was there. It takes going right for the corner, rushing at it like the Harry Potter platform at King’s Cross, to get close enough for the optical illusion to reveal itself: The walls don’t meet. It looks like a corner, but it’s not. Through there, a narrow corridor crowded with rubbish bins leads to the Master’s Garden, and through that to the room where I had my supervisions with George Hart-Fraser.

Pip was already there. Her whole name is Philippa, but she always chirps, “Call me Pip!” You can hear the exclamation mark. I assume we were paired up because we’re both girls. She was the only other girl in our year in Maths at Corpus.

She always wears skirts. In the cold, she adds leggings underneath. She uses a curling iron on her long hair and smells like watermelon-scented hairspray. Her charm bracelet tinkles.

“Hi!” she said when I came in,
tinkle tinkle
as she waved. I entered the scent cloud and sat in the chair next to her. The chair across the table was empty.

“He’s late,” she whispered, as if saying it were scandalous.

“George isn’t the type to oversleep, is he,” I observed, stretching my mouth in a yawn.

“He’s in Chile, silly,” she said, pronouncing “Chile” to rhyme. Mum and Shep are going to South America in February. They’re going to Carnival in Rio. “Where were you?” Pip asked.

“I was asleep,” I said. “So who are we waiting for?”

“Dr. Oliver.”

I stiffened. Dr. Oliver was our Director of Studies. Failing to have done the work for a supervisor was bad enough; in front of Dr. Oliver, it could cause me real trouble.

“Luke warned me he might not show,” she said. “He was meant to take over George’s lecture to first-years this morning, but he walked out.”

Luke is Pip’s boyfriend. He’s in first year Maths at John’s.

“Luke said they got about five minutes in. Dr. Oliver caught Luke texting.…” Here she pouted her lips, so I assume he was texting her, “and told him off. Luke said he apologised, and Dr. Oliver looked him in the face and walked out. Just like that. Luke’s worried he might be in real trouble. I told him he couldn’t be, not for a small thing like that. But Luke said Dr. Oliver seemed upset.”

“What else did Luke say?”

She looked up and squinted. “Nothing else,” she finally reported. I don’t think she got that I was teasing her.
Luke said, Luke said, Luke said.…

“Why is George in Chile? Is it a conference?” I asked. He must have told us, but I don’t always listen.

“For the VLT.”
Ah. Lucky
. He got to deal with the literally named Very Large Telescope. He’d come to astrophysics by way of maths, which is why he was supervising us. I’d considered physics when I was younger, mostly because I like the stars. That’s not really a good enough reason, like kids who want to become vets because animals are cute.

I leaned back in my chair. We should wait a little longer, but then we could leave.

“If Dr. Oliver isn’t coming, we might as well go over the work ourselves.” Pip pulled a folder out of her bag. Her problem sheets were neatly stacked, with careful pencil work in a notebook.

“I didn’t do the exercises.”

She pursed her lips. “Lucky no one’s come, then. Why not do them now? Do you have any questions?”

“You’re not the teacher, Pip.”

“We can learn from each other, can’t we?” I think it’s a trick of makeup that made her eyes look so wide open, but it gave an impression of earnestness that made her forgivable. And she did know the work better than I did.

We were looking at Markov chains. They’re series where each new action is unrelated to the past, springing only from its immediate present, not making any kind of deliberate or cumulative pattern. They call it a “drunkard’s walk,” meaning every step is truly random. My friend Katja lives like that. She doesn’t feel constrained by expectations, and picks every new job based on its own possibilities, not to make any kind of climb or progress.

She got me a Christmas job, in the same place where she’s working.
Thank God
. The alternative would be to stay with Aunt Clara in Iceland. It’s dead boring there, and she acts like I’m still ten. She painted the guest room with rainbows and bought a unicorn lamp for the bedside years ago, and nothing’s changed. She invites me to go feed the ducks, and promises me pudding if I help set the table. I can’t bear it.

“Oh!” Pip got down on one knee and picked a bright spark up off the floor. One of the earrings had fallen out of my pocket. “I’ve been looking for this!” she announced. “It was my mother’s, from before she met my dad. She used to wear them for dates.” She put a hand on her cheek in mock shock. Her mother’s pre-marriage romantic life was apparently blushworthy. “Help me find the other one.”

I got down on the floor, too. She babbled on about how it could have got there, and that she hadn’t worn them to any supervisions. Maybe, she wondered, she put them in a pocket and they fell out.

“That’s stupid,” I said quickly. Too close to the truth.

“Well, how else would it get in here?”

I crawled over to a corner and pretended to look under a chair. I figured I could pull the second earring out of my jacket and make it look like I’d found it.

Except it wasn’t there.

I started really looking.

“Any luck?” she asked. Then, “How could the cleaners have missed it?” She’s not dim. She’d found the first one between our two chairs. It’s not like it had been sitting there for a week since she’d lost it. The room had been hoovered. She tapped her chin.

“Pip, I—”

“Maybe it had been caught in my skirt?” she suggested.

“Maybe,” I cautiously agreed.

“I washed it yesterday. Maybe they were in a pocket, and then got mixed up with the rest of the clothes!”

And what? Nipped onto the skirt?

“It’s been twenty minutes. He’s not coming.” She straightened her paper pile by tapping it on the table and inserted it back into her neat rectangular bag. “Let’s go to the laundry room and look there.”

I followed along, looking on the way. The missing earring might be on the stairs or the path outside. She’d think it fell off her on the way to supervision.

She turned left out of the building. I forgot that Pip comes this way, closer to her staircase. She paused to peer into the cluster of branchy bushes near the wall.

“Oh!” she said, bounding over to the path near the rubbish bins. She plucked the sparkle up and gave it a little kiss.

“Wow, isn’t that lucky!” I said.

“So weird. I never come this way.”

“Me neither. The rubbish bins are disgusting.”

“Maybe a magpie tried to carry it off and it was too heavy!” she joked, I think.

Gran used to call me “Magpie.”

“This is going to sound stupid, but I thought someone took them. I’m glad that’s not what happened.”

I breathed out and smiled. I think she really meant it. “Me, too.”

I pulled my curtains. I know the camera never faces me, but it’s there just the same.

I dumped handfuls from out of my bottom drawer onto the bed: pens, gloves, a hairbrush, a scarf, a bag of sweets, books. Surely every one of these has been replaced by now. The earrings were an aberration.
I’d assumed they were cheap accessories, not family heirlooms. I’d be more careful.

No, I’d stop.

I’d try.

I checked each item for value and personalisation. Fur lining poked out of the gloves’ wrist holes. They were expensive, maybe a gift. The books all appeared haggard from use. One of them, the only hardback, had an autograph inside.

The gloves and the hardback, then. I’d return them.

The rest, including the paperbacks, I dumped into a sack for the nearest charity shop. I didn’t have to go far, and one shop in particular caught my eye. In the window, someone had put a book back the wrong way, with the back of it faced out to me.

I knew that face. I knew that book. It was what the girl I watch from the kitchen had been reading.

I gave the woman behind the counter my donation and 50p for the book. It was called
The Timpanist
, by Stephen Casey. I opened it right there in the shop.

It’s about the members of an orchestra implicated in an unspecified crime. Well, that’s the frame of it, just an excuse, really. The musicians talk to one another while they wait, and answer police questions at their turns. Everything keeps coming back to the timpanist, who wasn’t onstage the whole time. Timpani, those big great kettledrums, are only for exclamation marks. Composers use them sparingly, so the percussionist has a lot of free time. One of the violinists is in love with him. That’s what I got from the jacket flap.

The kitchen girl had left the book facedown about two-thirds through. I flipped pages to try to find what might have been her place. It opened straight to a sex scene, as if the person who originally owned this copy had cracked the spine at that place.

I snapped it shut. That’s not the kind of thing to read in public.

I took it home and read it from the start, in my room. The scene I’d glimpsed in the shop wasn’t a sex scene after all. Rape isn’t sex, not really. I don’t know how any reader could stop at this point; this was something to get beyond, something to escape or avenge. I kept going.

I stayed up late to finish. When I was ready to go to sleep, I still had maths to do.

CHAPTER 15