by Katie Khan
‘Exactly.’
‘Or mothers.’
‘Quite,’ she says, daring a grin.
‘One day,’ he says gingerly, as he thumps down on the rug and winces at the crack of his spine, so loud she can hear it through the speaker, ‘can we have a conversation that doesn’t revolve around bloody time travel?’ He pauses. ‘Or not. Whatever.’
‘I’m not sure I know how,’ she says. ‘It’s all I’ve thought about for years.’
‘I know,’ Isaac says sadly. ‘And I still don’t understand it.’
Thea tilts her head. ‘I didn’t think you wanted to. Not a fan of complicated explanations, if I recall.’
‘Since I’ve been working over here, I only seem to come across complicated explanations. I’ve discovered there are two types of people in this world: those who use big long words to sound clever, and those who break any topic down into its simplest form so anyone can understand. Perhaps,’ he says, ‘you can break down your theory for me.’
‘More than I already have?’
‘Yes, more than that.’ His face looks sober for a moment. ‘My boss at the Guggenheim only likes me because I broke down “soccer” for him. Guaranteed promotion.’
‘You don’t even like football,’ she says, laughing despite herself.
‘I know.’
‘Don’t tell me you used ketchup bottles to explain the offside rule?’ She’s thoughtful. ‘Maybe I can explain the speed of light using salt and pepper pots …’
‘Of course I didn’t.’ Then: ‘I used invaluable manuscripts, instead. We were in the archive at the time.’ He pauses. ‘I’m coming back to the UK in two weeks, actually, to renew my visa.’
‘Oh,’ she says cautiously, unwilling to ask if they can meet.
‘Maybe we can meet up,’ Isaac says.
‘Really?’ Thea says. ‘Sorry, Isaac. I should have asked how it’s been going.’
He waves it away. ‘You’ve got bigger things to worry about than me restoring old documents or fiddling with digital records.’
‘I’d better go,’ she says, reluctantly. ‘Apparently I need to find somewhere to live.’
‘Call me whenever you need.’
She nods. ‘Thank you.’
‘What for?’ he says.
‘For the lack of lecture.’
‘Hey, Thea,’ he calls down the phone before she hangs up and, lens to lens, she looks Isaac straight in the eye.
‘Yes?’
‘Did you know approximately three billion pizzas are consumed in the United States each year?’
She smiles. ‘I did not. Did you know that, allegedly, eating pizza once a week can reduce the risk of cancer?’
‘As if I needed another reason,’ he says. ‘I’ll bring you back some.’
‘Pizza? Across an ocean?’
‘Believe me, it’s worth it.’
Despite the ridiculousness of his offer, and the largesse of his promise, for the first time since Professor Schmidt told her she was the type of person who would fail to live up to her own potential, Thea feels something like hope.
She packs up her belongings quickly: the cheap high street clothes twisting at the seams from over-washing; drugstore makeup leaking free from its plastic packaging; a variety of chipped novelty mugs. It would pain Thea to acknowledge that nothing she considers significant in her life is found here in her shared house; everything she values seems to have an intangible connection to the world she’s just lost – her friends, her theories, and her most prized possessions, which are hopefully still lying on the floor of the Beecroft laboratory.
Her friends. Thea has missed calls from Urvisha and Rosy – even Ayo – but failure brings with it its own special type of embarrassment. She’ll speak to them eventually, but not yet.
She takes a moment to check that the video Urvisha uploaded went through without interruption or corruption, flagging a section of the video to watch in detail, frame by frame, later.
After she rings the Beecroft reception desk for something like the third time, Tony’s boss, Jim, finally delivers her equipment from the lab. Arms crossed, wearing a sneer like it’s his own personal brand, Jim fails to lift a finger as she unfolds the huge hinged sections of the glass house, checking for cracks. She’s not beyond sending them a bill, should she find any. When all appears to be in order, despite the security guard’s heavy handling, she closes the door without a word.
He’d looked at her like she was nothing.
She has to leave Oxford.
The thoughts terrify her, as she looks out of the window at the city she’s known for eight years; across Turn Again Lane towards the college grounds, empty at 6 a.m., the bedroom lights of the keenest students beginning their early-morning study, the athletes heading down to the river for rowing practice. She has to get away from here, to escape the labels she can feel attaching themselves to her.
A failure.
A dropout.
And worst of all – wrong.
She loads up the car with her paltry possessions and starts driving out of the city. There is only one place she can go, though there she will have to fend off her crushing sense of failure as it combines with something else.
Something worse.
Dawn finally cracks across the sky as Thea heads north, the yellow sun round against the rose-tinted horizon. The red in the sky won’t last long – in fact it’s already dissipating as the sun rises – but she eyes the first light with a distracted interest.
Thea approaches the outskirts of a small village on the Yorkshire–Lancashire border. She reluctantly follows a long-held family tradition of waving at the sign bearing the tiny settlement’s name: Dunsop Bridge. The word nostalgia often has positive connotations, but for Thea, the nostalgia of returning to the place where she grew up is melancholy.
Previously part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, now part of Lancashire, there is little in Dunsop Bridge to write home about – and, more significantly, no one at home to write to. She crosses the bridge, the water of the river low and filled with yellow leaves fallen from the trees, and passes the chequered window of Puddleducks. The village tearoom is lit up for a lunch rush that, out of season, will not come.
There’s nothing here, really, other than a special geographical status only the villagers enjoy, which adorns metal keyrings and tea towels in the local shop for sale to tourists who rarely appear in the colder months.
Thea draws a breath in, then out, slow and steady, as she continues past the church of St Hubert’s with its neat graveyard outside, elegant headstones bordered with clipped box hedges, before pulling off the road past the church onto a dirt track, into the wood.
There’s nobody around.
Thea drives through the trees, passing the vast outbuildings of a farm, black wood barns varying from ramshackle to new – well, new fourteen years ago. Almost fifteen.
She continues past a cylindrical brick dovecote and a cart lodge, pulling up outside the farmhouse. Four hours and seven minutes after she left Oxford – a deeply unsatisfying time with neither roundness nor mathematical significance – she has arrived.
She sits in the car for an additional three minutes, breathing slowly, watching until the clock ticks over.
Four hours and ten.
Come on, then.
She opens the car door, taking a key from under a stone gnome and unlocking the front door.
‘Hello?’ she calls, but nobody will answer and she knows that. It’s a courtesy only, an intruder announcing their arrival. She steps into the hall.
It’s exactly as she last left it, though that was some years ago. Nothing has changed, except the musty smell and lack of electricity. She’ll have to sort that immediately.
White dustsheets adorn the furniture, and Thea reaches up to pull back the sheet covering the grandfather clock in the hall, causing a beautiful dance of dust motes in the early afternoon light. She steps back, eyeing the antique clock face, listening for its tick.
She
frowns – it’s quiet. Carefully she opens the mahogany clock door, placing her hand on the side of the pendulum disc. She moves it to the far left, and after a beat she releases, so it swings down to the centre and up to the right.
Thea stares at the grandfather clock, deep in thought, waiting for the pendulum to settle into an even swing. The tick-tock sound is loud in the empty farmhouse. Her sense of failure is even more acute here – if that’s possible. The shadow of familial expectation is long, and returning in her current, fragile state has knocked her more than she ever could have expected.
She hates the idea that she’s letting anyone down but herself. She needs to redeem herself, she thinks. And there’s only one way to do that.
The motion of the grandfather clock pendulum makes her think about the experiment once more, about how Rosy disappeared for five minutes after she fired the laser at the glass house.
Thea drops down onto the bottom step of the dark wood staircase, watching the pendulum move back and forth. She knows with the itchy feeling of surety that, somehow, the motion is important, but in her current mindset she can’t quite piece it together. There’s something about the swing she can’t grasp …
She sighs.
She’d better let somebody know where she is. She takes out her phone and messages one person her location.
Five hours behind, most likely texting while eating breakfast, that person responds.
You went back there? Remember, Thea, they’re only ghosts.
She knew Isaac would understand the toll it might take; how it might feel to come back to a house that should be filled with the bustle of family life, with parents saying, ‘Back so soon?’ and offering to make toast and tea as she moans about Professor Schmidt. But Thea’s parents are long gone. Her mother and father are memories and dust, where once they were flesh and warmth.
Ghosts.
The thought haunts her. But she’s comforted that somewhere, across time zones, somebody understands.
∞
They had met for the second time at another university event, surrounded not by telescopes and hot toddies but instead by drills and pliers of all shapes and sizes.
Thea was arguing with the course leader when Isaac arrived, and he stood to the side as she talked hurriedly. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said to the wiry man in charge, as he neatly laid out tubs of beads on the wooden workbenches, ‘I need to reshape this glass prism—’
‘This is a jewellery-making class, madam. If you want to cut glass, wouldn’t you be better off in engineering? Or the science labs?’
‘I can’t do it in the labs, not yet,’ she said with gritted teeth. ‘You work with precious stones, don’t you?’
‘Sometimes,’ he conceded, ‘but today is an introductory session. We’ll be working with exquisite glass beads. I implore you—’
He trailed off as Thea marched away, and Isaac slid into the seat next to her as the session began.
‘We really must stop meeting like this,’ Isaac said, and she frowned. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘I like meeting like this,’ she said, still fierce from her run-in. ‘It means we have the same interests.’
‘Or the same obligations. I’m making a birthday present for my girlfriend, the poor girl.’
Thea felt the drop in her stomach, like the feeling you get when you send an email in error. ‘That’s nice of you.’
Isaac smiled, his face tentative.
She slammed a pair of pliers down on the bench. ‘The idiot running this thing won’t let me use the glass-cutting equipment until the sixth week of the course.’
‘Then I suppose we’ll have a lot of time to get to know one another.’ He picked up a coil of thick wire, which he began bending into curls. ‘Is this about your glass prisms?’
‘What are those meant to be?’ she asked, indicating the swirls of wire he was shaping without finesse.
‘I don’t know – earrings, perhaps?’ He held one up to Thea’s ear, and made a face. ‘My girlfriend is rather fancy, from a very respectable family, so I don’t know if these are quite her style.’
‘If a person already owns everything they could possibly want, making them a gift by hand is the best way to go.’
Isaac beamed. ‘That’s exactly what I thought.’
‘Though,’ she said, her eyes again returning to the pile in front of him, ‘you’re going to have a hell of a time making another earring to match.’
‘Who says they have to match?’ Isaac said, gleefully bending another coil of wire into a bizarre, cloud-like shape. ‘You prize symmetry too highly.’
Thea gazed at him, taken aback. ‘Tsung-Dao Lee says symmetry considerations are the backbone of our theoretical formulation of physical laws,’ she said, having never been so well measured by a stranger in her life.
Isaac glanced sideways at her. ‘I don’t know what any of that means, but your Mr Lee, whoever he is, is wrong, so far as I’m concerned. I prefer asymmetry. Flaws are what gives a person their character.’
‘He won the Nobel Prize.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘You know, in diamonds, they’re not called flaws; they’re inclusions.’
‘I like that.’ He smiled. ‘A person has to have inclusions to be whole. Though I bet those rings on your fingers don’t have many flaws.’ He gestured at the hand holding the pliers.
‘These?’ She turned her left hand over so the stones caught the light. ‘I inherited them.’
‘Lucky,’ he said. ‘Why do you wear them in that triangle formation?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, lightly touching her three rings: one on her little finger and one on her forefinger, then one with a glittering diamond worn halfway up her ring finger, sitting just above the joint. ‘I always have.’
‘It’s unusual,’ he said.
She turned her hand over once again so the diamond caught the light, earning a frown from the course leader on the other side of the room. ‘At least this way it doesn’t look like an engagement ring,’ she said.
‘No frightening, rugby-playing fiancé tucked away, ready to box the ears of your newest, jewellery-making male friend?’ He pretended to cower.
‘Alas, not.’ Thea smiled. ‘That doesn’t sound quite my type.’
‘Well, phew. My girlfriend can be quite intimidating when you first meet her, but once she’s on your team, she’s the most loyal friend you could have. You should meet – I think you’d really get along.’
‘That would be nice.’ She helped him twist the wire and cut off the excess, so the earrings formed complete, if uneven, loops.
Isaac sat back to admire the homemade squiggles he’d crafted, his smile slipping as the beaded decoration fell off. ‘I’d better get to the shops before they close,’ he said ruefully, looking at the clock, ‘and find her an actual present. It’s Rosy’s birthday tomorrow.’
Five
A week after she arrives at the farm, Thea wakes on the floor of one of the outbuildings, a dusty blanket lying over her.
‘What the …?’ she tries to speak, but her voice cracks, and she rolls over and reaches for her alarm clock – which isn’t there, because she isn’t in her bed. Christ, she feels awful. Is this flu?
The hourglass lies on the cold floor next to her and Thea picks it up, staring incomprehensibly at the blue sand. Her head is hot, and full. That’s the best (and only) way she can describe it. The length of her skin aches as she sits up, the texture of the old blanket rubbing against her sensitive nerve endings. Everything hurts.
She gazes round, taking a second to re-orientate, and when she remembers she’s at her childhood home she almost hides back under the blanket, afraid to face her ghosts. But the floor is freezing so she rises stiffly to her feet, once more looking at the setup she’s been working on here.
She’s out in the barn. She remembers now. It’s the large one with the double-height ceiling, and the glass house is here, glimmering in the morning light. Lord, her throat’s sore, and her head is throbbing.
But when she hears it for the third time, she realizes it’s the doorbell at the farmhouse. That might even have been what woke her, if the sound reaches that far. Pushing through the pain of her aching body and exhaustion, she walks as fast as she can through the gardens, letting herself into the kitchen.
The doorbell clangs again, and from inside the house she can hear the ancient bell knocking against the woodwork of the doorframe. If whoever’s there pulls that hard again, it’s going to break. ‘All right, all right!’ she shouts, though her voice is fuzzy, her throat sore. ‘I’m coming!’
She yanks back the locks and opens the door, her mouth forming a surprised O.
‘Where in holy hell are we?’ Urvisha says from the doorstep.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘What do you think?’ Urvisha breezes past her, into the entrance hall.
‘Nice to see you, too,’ Thea murmurs, then brightens as Rosy walks through the door with a huge bunch of flowers.
‘Oh no, are you poorly?’ Rosy says, bending over to hug Thea with a gap between them, then resting her hand against Thea’s forehead. ‘You’re rather hot.’
‘I’m not feeling great – I spent the night in a barn.’
Rosy widens her eyes. ‘That would make anyone catch a chill,’ she says.
‘How did you find …’ Thea stops talking as she spots Ayo Adebamowo reversing the car they’ve rented straight over the turning circle.
Determined, Ayo rolls down the window and makes an apologetic face. ‘I’m a bit out of practice,’ she says as she gets out of the car, leaving it parked awkwardly. She remembers at the last moment to turn and lock the rental, looking proud to be so conscientious.
