by Sam Leith
Then she’d gone to sleep on her back, snoring very softly, and Alex had lain awake not minding that her neck was cutting off the circulation to his arm. Her breath smelled slightly sweet from Coca-Cola and slightly alcoholic from rum. The duvet was askew, and one of her breasts was exposed, spilling down towards her armpit, where he could see a patch of sore skin and a bit of stubble. She had a mole on the soft skin just where her neck met the hinge of her jaw.
On Sunday morning, when he woke up, Alex had shyly and, as he thought, politely made an excuse about having to be in the library, kissed her awkwardly and said something non-committal and gone.
That was how their relationship had started. When Carey arrived in the college she was sexually confident, easily flirtatious, at home in her skin. Now, having quietly worshipped Carey for months, domesticating the relationship by making a friend of her, he’d actually gone to bed with her.
But the relationship between Carey and Alex had not, as he had expected, fizzled out in embarrassment and apology. At the cost of a certain showy huffiness from Rob, who felt excluded and maybe liked Carey more than he had let on, they had gone from friendship to established coupledom almost without passing through the in-between stage of tugging and scrabbling and kissing in public.
They were at ease, and that seemed to suit them both well enough. Alex found passion, or the expectation of passion, unsettling. Why make something private so public? And the courtship thing – he knew he had to do it but the self-exposure it involved and the risk and the game-playing and the humiliation… If you liked someone and you fancied them, why did you have to go through all that?
Carey had taken that out of his hands. They knew each other. Alex knew that she liked peanut butter on the cheapest white bread she could find, that they had the same Veruca Salt album, that she got on well enough with her foster-father, argued with her foster-mother, had no sisters and was liked better by boys than she was by girls. He put this down to jealousy; she was pretty, and neither worked it nor apologised for it. It was a fact about her.
Alex didn’t know what attracted her to him, though. Men fancied Carey; women did not fancy Alex. Alex’s place, ordinarily, was as the nerdy but unthreatening best friend of girls whom he chastely worshipped but who didn’t think of him that way. Carey, on the other hand, had befriended Alex – and yet she also wanted to sleep with him. She did think of him that way. It was almost unprecedented, this state of affairs, and he intended to reward her with his loyalty. But it made him understand her less.
He wondered for a long time whether she was attracted to him by something she imagined he had that he didn’t; or whether later, that illusion having vanished, the relationship was sustained by her affection for something else about him, such as his family, with the dull and affectionate stability that hers lacked; or whether there was something lacking in her – a simple failure of nerve or imagination that led her to idle in his shallows when with her looks and confidence she could have been with anyone else she wanted.
He studied his face in the mirror, sometimes, wondering what she saw there, and not liking what he did. Alex, when he looked at himself, saw a weak chin and watery features. He had eyes that flinched away from the camera. In the family photograph, blown up big and behind glass on the half landing of the old house, the two brothers stood in front of their parents: Saul already as tall as their mother, wearing his four-square smile; Alex’s head minutely blurred with motion, eyes down and to one side, hooding his lids. The old wallpaper from that same room in the background, gold striping the green.
But it went on, nevertheless. Alex never asked Carey whether he had been a factor in her choosing to do her postgraduate work in Cambridge. And – at her request – they still hadn’t moved in together. She said she was ‘funny about sharing space’. But the fact that he loved her, after they had been going out for three years, was something he took for granted. It was another fact about her, like her beauty and the fact that he didn’t understand her.
She wasn’t delving, introspective, exhausting in that way some girls he’d known had been – even though, as he knew, she’d had it tougher than most of the thoroughgoing neurotics he’d been out with previously. She didn’t talk endlessly about her emotions, or expect him to. Good.
Alex, there and here, had made some miles without even thinking about it. He’d noticed the state line going past about an hour back. The afternoon was mellowing, and he was in Alabama. He turned off the air con, wound down the window. Warm air came in, the smell of gasoline. He thought of singing Lynyrd Skynyrd to himself but the urge to sing had left him.
What Alex didn’t know, as he was moving west, was that things were happening all around him.
Ahead of him, in Birmingham, a man stopped dead on the steps of the 16th Street Baptist church, in slanting sunlight, startled by the sound of birdsong. He shook his head. In the chattering of half a dozen birds on a telephone wire he could have sworn he had heard the first few bars of ‘Amazing Grace’.
In the time it took Alex to pass through the Talladega National Forest, every shop in the state of Alabama sold out of Chicken & Broccoli Flavor Rice-A-Roni. In one shop in Gadsden, a fight broke out over the last packet on the shelf. A pregnant woman, overcome by her craving, pulled a gun on the teenage boy who had beaten her to it. She did not shoot.
In two small towns, equidistant to north and south of the I-40, the highway down which Alex was travelling, two men fell back in love with their wives for the first time in forty years. The names of both men were ‘Herb’, and both of them had woken up that morning and rubbed their stubble sleepily while looking in the mirror and thought about shaving but decided not to bother. One of them was to live happily ever after. The other one was to fall down a well on his next birthday.
All over the state, brothers and sisters bumped into each other by chance as one was leaving the dry-cleaner’s, and the other was running in to try to pick up her laundry.
In Las Vegas, still many miles away, the odds tilted for the first time very slightly against the house in low-stakes blackjack. Red Queen would be told about this in due course – as soon as it became detectable.
Unknown to anyone but you, in the Gulf of Mexico a sailfish of prodigious size, aided by a freakish current off the coast, spent thirty minutes keeping pace exactly with Alex’s car. Then a shark took it.
Other things were happening. Things unknown to you, but known to me.
And other things, I suspect, were happening that are unknown even to me.
Chapter 9
You need to know, though, what happened when Isla Holderness met Banacharski. That’s where this begins. It begins with a woman with short, dark blonde hair, and a handsome pointed nose, and windburned cheeks, walking up a cart track in the French Pyrenees. This is May 1998, and the hills are very beautiful. Buttercups nod in the cold wind.
Isla is carrying an old-fashioned backpack – it belonged to her father, and has a frame made of hollow aluminium poles. She has on thick hiking socks, made of grey wool, and jeans tucked into them. She is tired. She has been walking and – where possible – hitchhiking around this area for nearly two weeks now. In her pocket is a passport-sized photograph snipped from an academic journal. It has been creased and recreased.
It shows a thin man frowning with an expression of, she judges, concentration or toleration of having concentration broken. His hair is dark, and very close-cropped, nearly a skinhead – a reaction, perhaps, to a hairline already prematurely receded. It suits him. His cheekbones are sharp and he looks handsome. He’s looking not at the camera, but downwards and slightly to one side. Something like amusement plays around his mouth. The photograph is ten years old.
She is excited, because she thinks she may have found him. She started from Carcassonne, and she has been walking from town to town, going deeper into the countryside. She told her colleagues, most of them at least, that she was going on a walking holiday. Nobody mentioned Banacharski, except Mike – Mike, she thou
ght, liked her – who when he heard she was going to the eastern Pyrenees said: ‘Off for a tryst with your boyfriend, I shouldn’t wonder.’
She is on a walking holiday. She’s thirty-two years old and she’s happy. She has been camping most nights, not more than one night in three treating herself to an inn. It’s warm in the days, but most mornings she wakes in her tent with dew on her feet. She hasn’t got much money. She eats chunks of saucisson sec with a penknife, and tears bits of bread to go with it. She has, in a compartment of her backpack, a jar of cassoulet and a tin of pineapple pieces for an emergency.
But when she passes through each village, she shows the photograph. She enjoys doing what a tourist would do – sitting in the village square, if there is one; eating her lunch quietly. She asks, with her halting French. At first it was hard. Now easy.
‘Cet homme – un ami… vous savez ou il est?’ She’d show the photograph. Cheeks would be rubbed, grunts emitted, more grizzled friends summoned over sometimes.
‘Il s’appelle Nicolas. Nicolas Banacharski. Il est un… il fait le mathematique…’ Here, she’d find herself feebly miming something halfway between a scribble on an imaginary table and a scribble on an imaginary blackboard. Her mime for mathematics was no more necessary, nor more plausible, than her mime for telephoning, or typing – the former consisting of an imaginary Bakelite earpiece and the latter of a peculiar ragtime piano solo played at the level of her clavicles with her eyebrows around her hairline.
Still, all this seems to endear her to the gruff old Frenchmen. Most of them seem to have heard some stories of a crazy mathematician. She has been following, generally, whichever wave of an arm her last informant offered. She’s tried to pick market towns when there were markets. But she isn’t hunting. Her idea is simply to have a holiday – to give it shape by hoping she’d stumble across the great man, but that isn’t the point of it, not at all.
Then, yesterday, she was buying her lunch in a boulangerie in Nalzen and waiting for the orange-haired old chimp to ring up her sandwich. She was wondering how long that display of Chupa Chups lollipops had been there, when she looked out of the window over a display of baroquely iced cakes and exquisitely lacquered strawberry tarts.
It was him. To the life. He was going past on a bicycle, lolling, with one hand on the handlebars and the bicycle describing lazy, open sweeps back and forth across the empty street.
The woman squawked as Isla barged out of the shop to give chase. She left her backpack in the shop, yanked open the door and hop-skipped after him in her ridiculous socks.
‘M’sieu! M’sieu!’
Half of her had imagined that if she ever met him he’d run or yell at her. She wasn’t quite prepared for him simply to stop. He braked, and turned round. He looked startled, but not yet annoyed.
‘Pardon… pardon…’
‘Quoi?’
‘Nicolas?’
‘Quoi?’
‘Je suis Isla.’
His look was shifting from startled and sympathetic, to alarmed.
‘Isla Holderness – nous avons…’ She remembered he spoke English. They’d exchanged letters in English. ‘It’s me, Isla. We’ve – I mean, I’ve sent you letters. I’m Isla Holderness.’
‘Mam’selle…’
The man on the bicycle was kindly. He stayed put for her stammering explanation, and was gentle in telling her that the words ‘Isla Holderness’ meant nothing to him in any order at all, and that he was certain they had never exchanged letters. He was a handyman, not a scholar – he had used the word ‘scholar’, clumsily, when she’d said ‘mathematician’. He laughed when she showed him the photograph, though. He had to admit, it looked like him. No, no apology necessary. Au contraire. His name was Pascal. Enchanté.
But a mathematician? Lived alone? Pascal thought he might know him. Yes, bald. Not looking like this, though. He was an eccentric, sure enough – Pascal didn’t remember his name but it might have been Nicolas. He looked at the photograph, blotting out the lower half of the face with his thumb and looking at the eyes. Isla could see they were different, now, Pascal and Banacharski, about the eyes.
They were still standing in the street. It was a small town and no cars had come. Pascal rolled his bicycle back and forth with his hips, turned the handlebars lazily with his free hand. He seemed to be smirking.
‘Peutàtre.’ It was an old photograph. He couldn’t tell. But there was this type living in a shack up above Tragine. Pascal had gone to fix his septic tank. Had a lot of paper. He was – Pascal made a waving gesture with his hand… Big beard, Pascal said. Like a blaireau. People talked about him. Jewish, he thought. Maybe an inventor?
He left her after a few minutes, scribbling his phone number, as an act of gallantry, with a blunt stub of pencil on a bit of cardboard torn from a packet of cigarette papers. She folded this once and tucked it into the coin pocket of her jeans. They had made friends, though as she watched him cycle away she noticed that the bicycle was wagging less than previously and his head was wagging more.
She went back into the boulangerie and endured a foul look. The baguette, which she ate sitting on a low wall in the sunshine, was delicious. She spent the night in a field outside Freychenet, more excited than she was prepared to acknowledge to herself.
Now Isla is walking up, leaving the last outbuildings of the farm she passed behind her. The cart track is dry, and the sun has baked worm-curls of mud on it. Her new walking boots bash satisfyingly and painlessly off them. As a contour slopes round she glimpses the roof of a wooden cabin. The quarter-acre of land in front of it has been raked out flat and hoed, and there are lines of bamboo poles with brilliant green-yellow bean shoots curling around them. Chickens scratch in the dirt.
She doesn’t think that Banacharski knows she is coming to look for him. She underestimates how small these towns are, and how close together. Banacharski knows she’s coming.
He didn’t know, at first, whether he wanted to be found. But now he sees her starting up the path towards him, smiling, and he thinks that he has been too lonely for too long.
‘So, Jones,’ said Bree. ‘This thing. This thing you have.’
It had been bugging Bree all afternoon, and she had been bugging Jones with it. It wasn’t something Bree could quite make sense of. And – she being a naturally sceptical person – it wasn’t something she completely believed, either. It was far from impossible that this was something Red Queen was doing just to mess her about. That Jones was a spy, or an actor, or some other damn thing. Indeed, that this whole thing might be some sort of fieldwork assessment exercise.
Jones didn’t say anything.
They were in the car, and Jones was looking out of the windshield at the road. They were on the road west out of Atlanta heading for Birmingham. The sun was low in the sky ahead of them. They reckoned the kid was on the move, and that he was heading west.
Bree had asked how they knew that and Red Queen had said something about triangulation. They had tried the idea of using fluctuations in the ambient spread of probabilities to track the device. They conjectured that its effect on the world might leak out from it – little subtle ripples of unlikelihood, little freaks, unexpected variations from the mean could be discerned if you looked at large enough bodies of data. Their conjecture – unless what they were seeing was no more than the effects of chance itself – seemed to have been borne out.
They were monitoring regular big spreads: sports events, the patterns of roulette wheels and hands dealt in the major gambling centres of the North American mainland. Of course – and Bree would never have doubted it – they had access to those data in real time. Over the last several hours there had been spikes, outliers, runs of aces, improbable snake eyes, statistically significant fluctuations.
Red Queen didn’t go into detail – just hints. Bree imagined low-level employees sitting in safe houses in all fifty states flipping quarters every ten seconds and noting down the results: ‘Heads, tails, heads, heads, tails, heads,
heads, heads, heads, coin landed on edge, heads, heads, heads…’ Whatever was measurable was measured.
Wispy though it was, all these variations, plotted together, seemed to signal some sort of gradient, something geographical, arranged around a moving focus. And the data was consistent with that focus heading westwards at approximately the speed of an automobile travelling down a highway. Crudely, as Red Queen explained it, the closer to this thing you got, the less likely it was that you’d roll a four one time in six. Dice were behaving themselves on the eastern seaboard, Red Queen said. Dice were becoming more unruly to the west.
That, then, was the weather report: that was the state of chance. Things were getting more unlikely in the south-western United States of America, with a front of downright implausible moving in from the east. Conditions in Atlanta and points east were calming, with nobody expected to beat the house for the foreseeable future.
‘This thing,’ Bree repeated. ‘Does it make life fun?’
‘I don’t understand.’ Jones said that to a lot of enquiries. Bree had learned to persevere. She stopped talking, and looked at the side of his face like he was a Sudoku.
‘Knock knock,’ said Bree.
Jones didn’t say anything.
‘I said: knock knock. You know about that, Jones. Don’t pretend you don’t. You grew up in some laboratory somewhere you never got told knock knock jokes?’
‘I know knock knock jokes. I just don’t know why they make you laugh.’
‘So you know what you say?’
‘I know.’
‘So say it.’
‘Who’s there,’ said Jones, but he said it without a question mark.
‘Boo,’ said Bree.
‘I’ve heard that one,’ said Jones.
‘Say it for me, Jones,’ said Bree with a wheedling intonation. If you’d been watching carefully you could have identified her coaxing manner as flirtatious, almost.
