The Whole World (11 page)

I didn’t relax until I pushed in the heavy oak door of a pub.

By the time Richard Keene walked in I was past thinking clearly. He was with Alice. They would be married soon. I acted like it was my first drink. It wasn’t anywhere near that.

“Working hard?” Richard asked. Because he was my supervisor. I didn’t look like I’d been working.

I shook my head.

“Good,” he said, drinking. “It’s good to take a break.”

I should have talked to him. Alice said she’d be right back; we had the privacy. I could have told him everything that troubled me.

“I have to go,” I said, but I didn’t move.

“I have to go,” I repeated, to prod myself. I turned.

He said, “Wait,” I think, but then Alice came back. He stood up, and I got away.

I felt breathless outside, like I’d escaped something. Ludicrous. Richard’s a good friend. I started to walk in small circles in front of the pub, convinced it would sober me up. I actually made myself go back in. They didn’t see me. They were looking at each other. I thought,
Right, some friend he turned out to be
.

I pushed between several chairs and put my fist on their table. “You want to talk? All right, I’ll talk.” They looked shocked. I was shocked myself. What could I say? About Liv? About Gretchen? What could I say about anyone that wouldn’t make it worse for them, not being wholly mine to share?

“Sorry,” I mumbled. Richard got up. He had to push Alice’s chair forward to get to me. He pushed his fiancée to get to me.

“Go home,” he said, putting a hand on each of my shoulders. “Get some sleep.”

That’s the thing with Richard. His good advice is always so uninteresting. There’s nothing arresting about it. No epiphany. It’s easy to ignore.

I tripped walking out the door, and caught the jamb to keep from pitching forward. The door bounced off my back. A group of students on the pavement stopped talking and waited for me to get out of their way. One of them had dark hair. I thought it was Liv for a minute, and stared, frozen. She looked at one of her friends and laughed, which snapped me out of it.

A bicycle bell jingled behind me. I wasn’t fast enough. The cyclist skidded sideways to avoid me and hit a parked car. Its alarm siren rose and fell, too close to my ears.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he demanded.

I didn’t answer. He pedalled away, not leaving a phone number tucked under the windscreen wiper. I groped in my pockets for an old receipt on which to scribble my number—it was partly my fault—but I didn’t have one. I leaned over a rubbish bin, and almost reached in to retrieve a paper bag. It had a wet stain and a bulge at the bottom, and I finally recoiled.

I leaned against a concrete pillar. My mobile rang, again, and I assumed that it was Liv calling from a borrowed phone. I’d already ignored two of those, in the pub. But this call was from Peter. I answered.

Peter and I have known each other since we were teenagers. We boarded at different schools, but attended some of the same camps and summer courses. We were both at Cambridge now. We both had theses to finish.

“What?” I said.

“Careful, mate. You’re being followed.”

I’d drunk too much to have a sense of humour. I flattened against the wall and demanded to know what the bloody hell he meant.

Peter laughed. “That girl you know? Polly? Her mother’s in town, and she’s been asking for you.”

“What are you on about?”

“I told her you might be at Magdalene. That’s why I’m phoning. If you don’t want to see her, don’t be at Magdalene.”

“I’m not.” I got myself together, and started walking along back streets toward Earth Sciences.

“You sound wrecked.”

“I thought you were Liv.” I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t want to explain.

“Mmmm … Liv,” he said, tasting her name. “You’re not responsible for her. She’s not your fault. You didn’t ask to be worshipped.”

“Some things are,” I said.

“Some things are what?”

“My fault. Some—a lot of things are my fault.”

He laughed again. “You dog! I thought it was the other one you were after.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” I picked up my pace.

“So what happened with her?” he asked, referring, I think, to either of them. Whichever was a better story.

“Polly …” I said, then trailed off. I don’t know what happened with her. I know what happened between us, but I don’t know what happened inside her.

“Look, you did the right thing. Liv knows what she wants. You’re better off.”

“I did the wrong thing. I did several wrong things. I’m doing a wrong thing right now.”

I skulked along the edge of Emmanuel College and crossed St. Andrew’s Street quickly.

I stopped short of my office. It wasn’t a refuge. The stapler and pencil cup were probably still scattered on the floor, where they’d fallen when I pulled Polly onto the desk with me. The cleaners would have taken the rubbish bin, but the smell of sick would still be there, trapped in the poorly circulated air.

“Are you in your office?” I asked Peter.

He was. I crossed the road. The massive whale skeleton on Zoology’s patio rattled in the breeze. Female voices in the car park froze me until car door slams shut them away.

That’s the moment I thought of Lesley Harter. I hadn’t thought about her, except in passing, for years. She was seven years my senior, which was an impossible distance when I was fifteen, at least to me it had been. Now she would be … thirty-one. Which seemed equally impossible. She was probably married. She was probably a mother. She ran her family’s businesses, and had done since she was twenty. But I thought of her as just herself.

I had met her at a dressage event, where one of her horses was competing. She knew Dad through work. Alexandra had wanted to see the “horsies,” which is why we were there. I’d only been out of choir for a year, having cracked my voice at fourteen. I’d never seen a woman so beautiful. While Mum chased after Alexandra, Lesley showed me the horses.

She asked me to carry a box of tack into the trailer attached to her car. I put it down in the corner and she followed me in. The trailer walls muffled the loudspeaker and applause. “It’s all right,” she said. She just stood there, waiting for something, and letting me know it was all right. I stepped close and kissed her, terrified I was doing it wrong. When I pulled away, she smiled again. “You’re a lovely boy,” she said. She waited a few moments more before turning to hang up a bridle. She left it to me, all on me. If I wanted to touch her I could. I could see the outline of her bra under her polo shirt. I couldn’t move. It was overwhelming. She took pity on me. She kissed me again. I was mad with it in my response; I kissed her all over her face. She had earrings on, hard little gems that scratched my lips.

That’s all we did. Then we went to watch her horse compete. When he won, she raised her arms up in a cheer. Her breasts lifted with her arms. I could hardly breathe.

We became friends, and I never touched her again. I hardly saw her, just now and then. But when I did, she spoke to me like she valued my opinion. That wasn’t new, exactly, but usually adults wanted to hear what I had to say about academic things. She wanted my opinions on life. Should she forgive someone, should she insist on some condition in a contract? It was somehow much the same as what had passed between us in the trailer. She treated me as an equal.

I would never tell Peter about her.

He opened the front door of the building for me, and we went up to his office.

An empty coffee cup from Fitzbillies bakery was on his desk. The last time we were in there together, he’d flirted with the woman at the till. I noticed that this paper cup had a phone number written on the side. Next to it was a stack of books with papers inserted between pages throughout. None of the books were open. There was an empire-building computer game on his screen. “I thought you were working,” I said.

He grinned. “Procrastination is part of my process.”

His whiteboard had notes scrawled on it in three different colours, and an idle sketch of a rowboat, surprisingly detailed. More of his “process.” Polly rushed into my mind, her laughing that Penrose had illustrated his talk with colourful homemade transparencies. It’s something to watch American standards and expectations get tickled like that.

Polly even looks American, though I can’t quite explain what I mean by that. She looks like someone in an American chewing gum advert.

“So …?” Peter asked, leaning back in his chair, and I knew what he meant. I was in the stiff-backed guest chair, sitting straight up. I shook my head. “You and Liv?” he persisted.

He was my friend. I had to trust somebody.

“I went too far….” I began.

“Holding hands is acceptable in this century,” he teased.

The opportunity shuttered. I couldn’t make him understand without spelling it out. And once he did understand, he’d make a joke of that too, wouldn’t he. He’d think it was hilarious.

“Tell me again about your brother,” I countered. His face froze.

“The hell?”

That was mean of me. His brother was the only thing he was sensitive about.

“Seriously, do you have a problem?” he wanted to know.

“Not me, mate.” I’d gone too far. It was out of character for me to bait him, but I had to get him off Polly and Liv. “I want to talk about something else,” I said. “The only things you’re willing to be serious about are your brother and your work, so let’s talk about them.” I pumped these words out in a rapid staccato.

“I don’t want to be serious right now,” he pouted. Then, “Fine, we’ll talk about work.”

“How’s your thesis?” I asked. This was a more normal conversation.

“It’s all right,” he said. “My thesis is all right. I’ll be ready to submit soon.”

“It’s about time!” I said, joking. I could finish this year too, but I’d probably drag it out. People don’t think I’ve got laziness in me, but that’s because thoroughness and laziness can look so much alike.

Thoroughness can be a cover for numerous less desirable things.

I shouldn’t have gone on to analyse the handwriting on Gretchen’s photos. But I’d gone on to “see the job through,” as my father had said to me a fair few times in my life, despite not being home terribly much. It was my personal sense of tidiness and completion that drove me to sort out the handwritings after Liv had left; compassion and responsibility, which is what I thought it was, would have involved observing Gretchen more carefully.

I take words at face value. Gretchen had said she wanted to know everything. I don’t do well overriding what people say about themselves. I don’t put body language and tone of voice over words themselves. I should, I know that now.

“You’re a real shit, you know that?” Peter said, still hurt that I’d brought up his brother like that. But he wasn’t going anywhere. He hadn’t shifted his weight, or leaned forward as if to stand.

I decided to respond to that, instead of the words.

“It’s not just Polly or Liv. It’s …”

He prompted, “What?”

“Kepler.”

“Johannes Kepler?”

I nodded and he laughed at me.

“The cosmologist? From how many hundreds of years ago?”

Four hundred years ago. Kepler had defended the Copernican theory of a sun-centred universe. Circular orbits didn’t work out; they couldn’t explain the path Mars followed in the sky, seeming to backtrack on itself. Another kind of orbit might. He set out to prove that the orbits of the five known planets followed the shapes of Euclid’s nested solids. This, to him, would have been a divine signature, proof that a sun-centred universe wasn’t godless or random.

What he found instead were ellipses.

Elliptical orbits are one of the greatest, most perfect discoveries in scientific history. They explained Mars’s apparent retrograde motion, the last scientific obstacle to a sun-centred system, and did so without any convoluted mechanics. Yet he despised them. They were too … I think “natural” might be the word. He’d been looking for a perfect crystal and had found a beating heart instead.

“You know,” I rambled. “Retrograde. Ellipses. The truth wasn’t exactly as he’d pictured it. So he hated it.”

I’d found truth for Gretchen. She didn’t want it.

“Are you drunk?”

“No.”

“You’re not all here.”

“I had an uncle who drowned,” I said. This had little to do with the flow or point of the conversation. But I said it.

It was the intensity of Gretchen’s faulty memories, I think, that triggered the thought. It was the way my mother always told me how much I used to look like my uncle; but, from the pictures I’d seen of him, I don’t think I ever did.

“I never knew that,” said Peter.

“It was before I was born.”

He picked up the paper coffee cup and rolled it between his hands. “Are you going to be all right? I’m supposed to meet someone. But if you want to talk about Polly or Liv, or your uncle, or Kepler …”

“No. No, thanks. Really.”

“Just a bit of advice, though, all right? Whatever you’re not talking about—it’s not as bad as you’re making it.”

He would know, wouldn’t he. He’s always got a new girlfriend.

“Is it the woman from Fitzbillies?” I asked, flicking my fingers against the cup.

“I’ll phone her this weekend. Tonight I’m meeting an old friend. We were a pair back in the old days.”

Old days? Undergrad, maybe? “I’m really sorry that I mentioned your brother.”

“I know. It’s done.”

“No, I’m really, truly sorry….” Regret and sentimentality inflated within me. “That’s not how to treat a friend.” I meant that in so many ways. I’d been poison to so many people in the space of two days.

“Nick. You’re drunk. You should go home.”

“That’s what Richard said.” Hours ago. Maybe by now the Chander girls would be in their room, doing homework or reading in bed. I wasn’t up to facing their usual enthusiasm.

I got up.

Peter’s phone rang. While he chatted and organised his laptop bag, I looked hard at that rowboat scribble on the whiteboard. The colours were vivid—red, green, and sunbright yellow.

I remembered Wesley, a blind boy Peter and I had both known from a summer cricket camp. He’d been blind in the same way as Gretchen: able to see in his earliest years and then losing it. He couldn’t play real games with us—it would have been too dangerous for him. But he could train. He was a decent bowler, actually. He couldn’t tell what was going on in the field, but he could see people as “blobs.” As for throwing the ball, he was excellent.