Hawking
When Gulnaz walks in through the door late the following evening Daniel immediately senses a barrier, as though a four-day crust has skinned over her softened heart – a layer to be chipped away again from scratch. No doubt she’s been bracing herself for bad news. While the cat was away had the mouse been at play? Was she to find an apartment strewn with beer cans, a pedal bin bursting with bottles and a tenant sozzled to the eyeballs? Or a more covert drunkenness, masked by careful waste disposal and mouthwash? Her scepticism disappoints him. Oh, she of little faith – wait till she hears what he’s been up to. The temptation is there to go diving in, or to pull her unceremoniously into the bedroom. But that crust of hers holds him back, forces him to follow the protocols that come with not having seen a close friend for some days. He must ask whether her course has been worthwhile, whether the trains were on time, whether she has eaten; things of that kind, while his eyes flicker impatiently across the table to the jotter and his mind dances with its revelations. His questions meet with summary replies; she’s clearly all too aware they’re of little interest to him. Perhaps she too can’t wait to talk of his experiences at the drop-in centre. Indeed, when the conversation can finally move onto the subject, her reaction is everything he might have hoped for. For one thing, she had never intended him to go twice in the same week; for another, she’d seriously doubted he would stick with it for the full two hours. Like Joan, Gulnaz was a believer in the slow, steady approach. What better moment then to sit her down and read through the session notes, show her the genogram, and let her see the benefits of a short intensive blast of self-analysis? Throughout the account she sits spellbound. The reading closes with his pièce de résistance; the final drinks tally: given the allowance of two drinks every other day, over five days he could legitimately have chalked up ten units.
“Daniel George, total alcoholic consumption Thursday to Monday: seven units!”
Seven units. Not bad. Her face confirms it. He’s encouraged to kiss her, and she does not resist. From this, the move to the bedroom follows seamlessly, from dressed to undressed, none of the frenzy of their first fumblings in the car – her softer, gentler touch quickly slows his impetuous hands. Not some headlong rush towards the finish: she is keen to take her time and stay with the sensuality and intensity of the moment. Naturally she insists on protection, but its introduction is without awkwardness or embarrassment. Gulnaz speaks very little throughout, no whispered nothings in his ear or moans of pleasure, her few words serve only to guide and encourage. This woman is no beginner at sex. If anything, Daniel feels himself to be the novice here. Knowing all the right moves is one thing, but the supreme confidence that she exudes, her focus on the beauty and power of sex, this is something new to him. So much is saved for the imagination – he never gets to see her fully naked. Once in his room, their physical contact remains beneath sheets, with the light off, just a smudge of sodium light penetrating the curtains. Underwear is slipped off unseen; the two of them lie face-to-face almost throughout. His sense of her body is that of a blind man, only his fingertips seeing her soft and pliant skin, the roundedness of her shoulders, the weight of her breasts, the slightly domed stomach and the widening out at the hips. In the semidarkness, the scent of her is all the more intoxicating too. She has showered before coming over – her own chemistry only gradually spices the smell of soap.
At their mutual moment of climax, through some involuntary flood of pheromones or synaptic spasm, Daniel is pulled from his body across a three-mile expanse of rooftops down into a stark, white room. The same life force erupting now into the woman above him floods through metres of tubing into the lifeless body lying there. As the couple cry out and unscrew their eyes, so Alex flinches, utters a gasp, and looks once more onto a bewildering world.
For him the night ahead is to be one of tyres squealing through corridors, of fleetingly glimpsed faces, of eyes probed by torchlight, nerve endings tested with hammers, feet and hands prodded. For Daniel and Gulnaz, a very different night. They catch the midnight chimes and the air detuning once more to the throb of an urban night, as they drift into a peaceful and ignorant sleep, their bodies entwined one around the other.
Breakfast the next morning proves to be somewhat less relaxed, incurring much tripping up in a kitchen too small to swing a cat – fortunately for Scoff, the tripping’s chief culprit. There is little in the house to eat; no eggs, no bacon, no beans. Gulnaz insists it’s fine. She seldom has more than a slice of bread and cheese in the mornings. But Daniel has even managed to run out of bread. In the end they both make do with cereals, plus tea for her and coffee for him. More than a little bemused by the notion of ‘Cheerios’, Gulnaz covers her mouth to stifle a laugh and works her tongue around in order to speak. Another of Daniel’s magic Moby loops, she declares, fishing a particularly malformed specimen from her bowl. It reminds her to ask whether he’s yet looked into those science classes at the Tech. As before, he shakes off the suggestion as being thoroughly impractical. In truth, the idea had totally slipped his mind. But with all that has happened since she first raised the idea – Alex back in his life, his drinking under control, the sessions with Joan, his relationship with Gulnaz at last on the up – to get himself out of the rut he’s in and into a real career suddenly seems feasible. The thought is put on hold, as attentions are turned to dredging milk from bowls, draining tea and coffee from mugs, ladling fish soup from Tupperware, stacking dirty dishes, cleaning teeth, fixing hair, refreshing lipstick, applying trouser clips and fluorescent strips, and running the gauntlet of a frenzied lobby, to kiss and part company in the forecourt and each set off for work. Only when he’s alone again can Daniel unleash his imagination to see where it might lead.
First thing would be to check out the local college. Given his GCSE’s, they would probably fast-track him through A-Level: he could be at university as early as September. Three years for a degree and the same again for a doctorate, a senior lectureship, promotion to head of department and, before he was even forty, tenure at some distinguished academy, probably abroad, probably America.
It would hardly do for someone so distinguished to be squeezing a clapped-out Golf from some corrugated iron shack for which the council charged a tenner a week. Time to place himself behind the wheel of a spanking new Mercedes convertible, gliding out of a spacious double garage attached to one of the grand Edwardian houses off Prince Albert Gardens. And no, he is not heading for a struggling garden centre on the verge of surrender to the giant chains, but to take up the professorial chair at one of the great universities in the city.
All just a bit of fun to start with. It’s only later in the day, when some of those wild theories he’d entertained as a teenager begin to reformulate in his head, that things turn a shade more obsessive.
The morning begins innocently enough, mostly spent outside rearranging frost-proof pots and dumping those that have shattered in the cold. It’s the act of rescuing a stray ball of garden twine from the shop floor after his break that sets him thinking about Hawking’s String Theory. Ah, String Theory – the point where Daniel and the great theorist had been forced to part company. For the visionary teenager it had needlessly tangled and knotted the simplicities of dimensionality and the perceptions of time. To his mind, the universe could be unravelled in a better way. Thinking ahead to his interview with the university selection committee, he begins to scour the shelves for common-or-garden items that could illustrate his ideas. A solar-powered ball light, a foot pump for a paddling pool and a pack of birthday balloons come conveniently to hand.
It’s all about having the power to imagine: for a three-dimensional being to visualise Hawking’s multi-dimensional universe. Naming time as the fourth dimension is just the coward’s way out. Extra spatial dimensions – along with up and down, left and right, forwards and backwards – that’s the challenge. He runs a hand over the surface of the ball. The secret is to ask how our own world would look to a two dimensional being; someone who lives – at l
east who thinks he lives – only on its surface. He would know nothing about the third dimension, wouldn’t know that he has height. If anything in his world were moved up or down, away from its level, then as far as that creature was concerned it would simply disappear. A surface that stretches on forever. We see that it’s a ball, but he’s unaware that his space is wrapped around in another dimension.
A delivery of bark chippings and fencing material brings Daniel’s introspection to an abrupt end. A shame. He was nicely on course to hit home with his counter-argument to the Big Bang theory, and in one fell swoop throw into disarray all the current scientific thinking about the expansion of the universe.
Half way through lunch, an inner voice urges him to ring the hospital, but the impulse to order a second helping of dessert soon robs him of the thought. Instead, at two fifteen sharp, with a store room of pre-Christmas stock still to clear out, Daniel, now Professor George, arrives at the Academy of Mathematical Sciences to give his keynote speech on ‘Infinity and the Universes Beyond’.
He steps up triumphantly to the podium and savours the expectant hush that falls over the theatre. “Fellow colleagues,” he begins. “I invite you to imagine that this balloon is our universe.”
A party balloon hangs limply from the end of the pump, like a spent condom. Sandwiching the device between both palms, with a firm squeeze he sets this little red universe on its journey of expansion.
“The birth of a universe!” he declares, and turns the ‘Happy Birthday’ message towards the adoring crowd. “As it expands, no matter where he looks, our 2-D friend on its surface finds everywhere stretching apart from everywhere else.” He gives the pump a couple more squeezes and the balloon grows to twice the volume. “But is there anywhere on the surface that you could call the centre of the Big Bang? Of course not. Its centre isn’t on the surface; it’s inside the balloon, out there in the third dimension.”
A couple of world-famous scientists have already clocked where this is heading, about to undermine everything on which their reputations are built. Mumbling, tutting, shaking their heads, mopping their brows, their distress is a delight to all around them. And Daniel shows them no mercy.
“Now, like our 2-D guy in a 3-D universe, we look out at the stars and find they’re all spreading apart. But suppose we’re just 3-D beings in a 4-D universe.” He points to a beetroot-faced rival. “People like him will tell you rubbish about being able to see back to the Big Bang and out to the very edge of the universe. Well that’s bullshit!! There is no centre and no edge – not in our dimensions! Those who say otherwise don’t know the first thing about anything!”
The room descends into mayhem, the first riot of academics the university has ever witnessed. Papers, cloaks and mortarboards fly in all directions, clenched fists rain down upon unsuspecting bald spots. Daniel slips from the building and into his waiting Merc, pleasure-cruising the streets for a while to savour his triumph, before reality draws him back to Greenalls and dumps him into its mustiest of storerooms. The time is nearly three, and he hasn’t even begun to clear the place. The workload screams out for attention. Only when it’s all done can he go home. Such are the trials and tribulations of the undiscovered genius.
Sorting the storeroom is something Daniel normally wouldn’t mind. Mostly, it’s to chuck out end-of-line stock or damaged goods, and sometimes the work turns up a few gems such as an off-cut of hose for his car or a chipped pot for a windowsill (turn the chip to the back and, Ta-da!, no-one would know). Today though, his preoccupation with loftier things makes the task demeaning and the windowless box-room unbearably stuffy. He sets to with grim resolve, determined to make light work of it and get home. The sooner he is gone, the sooner he can begin to plan his future sensibly. And there’s something else. A niggling in his brain. A compunction about something. An unease.
It’s all down to having not phoned the hospital. The discomfort in his belly bodes ill tidings. Something awful has happened to Alex and they have no way of reaching him. Naturally, he hasn’t wanted all and sundry at Greenalls to know about his private life: rumour mongering in this place has become endemic; it might be one big glasshouse but people still throw stones. It was a mistake though, not having left a work number. He could of course take a toilet break and make that call now. It’s really only fear that stops him, the same fear that would prevent him from seeing a GP about a lump on the testicles or an inflamed mole. And if he did make that call, only to hear the worst, where would he prefer to be, here in the middle of a shop full of worthless trash and dim-witted customers, or at home, in private, nursing a fine bottle of scotch?
Another five minutes and the strain would have forced his hand. As it is, he’s thrown a lifeline – appropriately enough by his line-manager, Jerry’s head poking round the door and announcing there’s a phone call for him at customer service. A woman calling herself Omars, or some such. Daniel is like a caged lion released into the wild. Gulnaz? They’ve agreed to meet at the hospital, but not till six. He wrenches the phone from the receptionist’s hand and calls her name, oblivious now to all fears of the rumour machine. Let them cast their stones.
“Daniel?” she cries, an urgency in her voice.
“Where are you?” he bellows back.
“I’m at the hospital. They called me in this afternoon to cover for a sick nurse. And good thing they did. Apparently Jon – Doctor Prentice – has been trying to reach you at home since this morning. It’s Alex. Daniel, he’s regained consciousness! But…”
“Christ! Stay there! I’m on my way.”
The handset is back in the receptionist’s grasp before he hears Gulnaz saying, “No, wait! I need…”
But her needs are lost to a disconnected line.
By means of a series of hand gestures and facial expressions across the shop floor, he lets it be known to Jerry that the storeroom will have to wait until tomorrow. Something has come up that demands Daniel’s immediate attention. He’s sorry, but there it is.
This is all so… so bloody… typical. So very… Alex. As Daniel nudges his way from the car park and forces himself into the swelling traffic he begins to see his brother’s grand blueprint. Unconditional love, it just isn’t enough. For Alex it never has been. For him one always had to shed tears of love. Their mother could never just take him shopping. She could never just get him ready for school. She could never just cook him a meal. Alex always had to make sure she was seen to suffer to do so. Alex couldn’t have simply brightened Daniel’s Christmas Day with a surprise visit, champagne and chocolates in hand – or sent a card, or made a phone call. Oh no, Alex had to arrive in style. He had to get Daniel’s blood boiling by draping himself over their mother’s gravestone. He had to give Daniel a fucking heart attack by disguising himself enough to draw him in close. He had to keep Daniel on tenterhooks until the DNA could confirm his identity. And he had to shroud his previous whereabouts in mystery by lingering on, mute, untouchable, for a whole damn fortnight, until he was good and ready, until enough tears of love had been spilled. Only now, at last, has he chosen to put Daniel out of his misery and come round. Only now has he finally decided that it’s time for this great riddle he’s posed to be answered.