Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind

by Anne Charnock

  Stevens, MaryAnne. Émile Bernard 1868–1941: A Pioneer of Modern Art. Zwolle, Netherlands: Waanders Publishers, 1990.

  Strocchia, Sharon T. Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

  Tillotson, Dianne. Medieval Writing: History, Heritage and Data Source. Last modified November 22, 2014. http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/.

  Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Artists: Volume 1. Translated by George Bull. London: Penguin Books, 1987.

  Welch, Evelyn. Art and Society in Italy 1350–1500. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

  Whistler, Catherine. Paolo Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2010.

  AN EXCERPT FROM ANNE CHARNOCK’S

  A Calculated Life

  CHAPTER ONE

  The second-smallest stick insect lay askew and lifeless on the trails of ivy. Jayna lifted the mesh cover, nudged the foliage with her middle finger, and the corpse dropped to the cage floor. It made no sense. The smallest of the brood, the outlier, should have died first. Why this one, the second smallest? She glanced at the temperature monitor. Surely, it wasn’t her fault? And it couldn’t be the food—she turned over a leaf—or they would all be ill by now. So what exactly . . . ? The surviving insects shuddered indifferently.

  Jayna placed the cover back on its base. One thing was certain. An autopsy was out of the question; she had no scalpels. In any case, she thought, it was a fact: in the normal run of things, people had autopsies; insects did not. She pushed a hand through her hair. One dead stick insect and now she was running two minutes late for breakfast. That’s all the death amounted to—a slight delay in her morning routine. The death would remain a mystery. No ripple of concern, no cascade of grief. She peered into the cage at the still-smallest stick insect.

  “Maybe you’re . . . just lucky,” she murmured.

  Jayna left Rest Station C7 with her friend Julie and together they headed towards the tower blocks of downtown Manchester. They looked like schoolgirls, holding their packed lunches and wearing identical office garb.

  “Why would the smallest, feeblest one survive longer?” said Jayna.

  “Was it feeble? Perhaps it was just . . . small,” said Julie.

  By the time they reached the Vimto sculpture on Granby Row, Jayna had scanned through the data she’d compiled over the past three months on the eating habits of her stick insects, their rates of growth, their response to stimuli—light, heat, and touch—morning and evening activity rates . . . thirteen variables in all. She plotted against time, overlaid the graphs, and compared. No help at all.

  “I kept a close eye on them all but I only took measurements for two—the two closest to average size,” said Jayna.

  “Hmm. Mistake.”

  The morning street projections let rip with the usual inducements—half-price breakfast deals, lunchtime soup ’n’ sushi specials. Julie peeled off northwards. Jayna, still perplexed, pressed ahead and pulled up sixteen data sets culled over recent weeks from a slew of enthusiasts’ forums and from academic studies by the Bangalore Environmental Research Institute. Rates of growth, population size, mortality figures; it was all there. She plotted the longevity of stick insects against their size at death, and regressed the data. The correlation with size was . . . heck, weaker than she’d imagined. She tripped on a raised paving flag. And as for luck, she thought, the tiniest survivor in mind, that was without doubt a dumbed-down term referring to randomness.

  On entering the high atrium of the Grace Hopper Building, she walked under the turquoise-leaved palms and bit her lip. She pushed the Bangalore data from her mind and considered her Monday schedule as she stepped to the back of the elevator. The doors closed with a whoosh-chang! and she tapped the back of her head against the elevator panel.

  Time to think straight. How should she handle her entrance? Act as though nothing had happened on Friday? Walk straight past Eloise? Or should she apologize without any delay? It was just too awkward . . . and confusing. She hoped Eloise had calmed down over the weekend. According to Benjamin, it was a simple misjudgment. “A minor faux pas”—his exact words. The elevator doors opened and she stepped out. She was relieved Benjamin had said minor. A bit of a faux pas would be worse, definitely.

  Pushing open the office door, she came to a decision. She would keep quiet, hope for the best.

  Eloise jumped up, lifted a hand—not exactly a wave—and scuffled across the analysts’ floor at Mayhew McCline to intercept Jayna. “Tea!” she said, and pulled Jayna towards the kitchen galley. “Listen, I’m sorry about Friday.”

  “No. I’m the one who’s sorry, Eloise. How was your father?”

  “You were right. No real panic. He was comfortable and sedated when I got there.”

  “You were worried. I wasn’t—”

  “I overreacted. I didn’t mean it.”

  “Is he still in hospital?”

  “Yes, should be home tomorrow.” She cocked her head to one side. “It was a very nasty fall, you know . . . but nothing’s broken. They’re running tests, giving him a full check.”

  “That’s—”

  “I shouldn’t have barked at you.”

  Jayna raised her eyebrows fractionally. She didn’t disagree. What had she said that was so bad? “Don’t forget the monthly figures before you go. Only take a minute.” It hadn’t exactly been a quarrel; too brief and one-sided. Jayna reassessed the incident: Eloise pushing things into her bag, one arm in her coat. She’d barged past and barked so the whole department heard, “You really are the bloody limit, Jayna.” The emphasis still caught her by surprise. And then Eloise had thrown open the office door. Her coat belt got caught on the handle. She’d yanked at the belt and shoved the door, which had slammed back against the wall.

  “Darjeeling, black, isn’t it?” Eloise turned and hit the kettle switch. “Jayna, you have to understand. We can’t all be as calm as you.”

  Jayna shook her head, “Nothing for me, thanks,” and turned to leave but Eloise touched her arm. “Listen, to be honest, I wanted to clear the air quickly. Something serious . . .” She hesitated. “You’d better see Benjamin, now. It’s about Tom Blenkinsop.” Eloise frowned at Jayna’s blankness and, as if spelling things out for a child, “It’s . . . not . . . good.”

  A bugbear, that Tom. She should have told him; if he needed so much help he should have asked through proper channels, booked some extra training, some official mentoring time. Maybe Benjamin had found out about his off-loading. It had started two months back when Tom sent her a research report before submitting it to Benjamin, with a request: Cast an eye over this, will you, Jayna? An aberration; an extra step in the accredited process. On the first three occasions the amendments had taken less than ten minutes but, from that point on, Tom’s requests had landed every few days and the reports had become weightier. She hadn’t complained because once she’d corrected the first report she hadn’t liked the idea of Tom’s errors reaching Benjamin. He might have missed them. So Jayna had developed the habit of charging the time to her own jobs; five minutes here, ten minutes there. She finessed his arguments, improved his executive summaries—his weakest area—and, when essential, she hunted down additional data sources to “beef things up,” as Tom himself would say.

  Benjamin usually worked in the middle of the analysts’ floor on the thirty-first but this morning he summoned staff to the thirty-second, to his so-called quiet room.

  “About Tom?” she said, poking her head around his door. Benjamin, slumped in his sofa, looked up at Jayna and seemingly had no inclination to say anything. She felt hot. “I thought his last report—”

  “It’s not about his work,” he said, and gestured to the armchair. “You know he’s . . . he was on holiday?”

  She did. Tom had dropped another tome on her before he left, with a brief note: Check and forward. Thx.

  “Was on holiday?”

  “Tragic accident,” he said. “I want to tell everyon
e individually.”

  “Tragic?”

  “Swimming in the sea . . .”

  Benjamin, she realized, had already told the story several times. He didn’t continue. So she prompted: “Drowned?”

  “His wife and kids were on the beach. Couldn’t do anything about it.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Swept out. His brother phoned me last night at home. He’s flying out today.”

  Another silence. What was she supposed to say? She recalled a drowning incident reported in the news. What did the journalist ask . . . ?

  “Have they found his body?” she said with precision.

  “No. Not yet. Only happened yesterday.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “And it’s going to be a long time before there’s a funeral. There’ll be an autopsy when they find the body . . .”

  Stumped.

  “Jayna, can you help me out?” Benjamin, gray-faced, pulled himself up to sit straight-backed. Was this one problem too many for Benjamin, she wondered, or was he upset? Tom had only joined seven months ago. “Can you go through his files? Finish anything that needs finishing. I think the others might find it too upsetting, so soon.”

  “Okay. I’m familiar—”

  “Thanks. Don’t tell the others. Just fit it around your own work. Let me know if I need to do any firefighting.”

  A secondary post-mortem, she thought. “Fine.”

  Jayna stepped along the corridor’s repeat-pattern squares and dipped into the washroom. Inside the end cubicle, she leaned back against the door.

  Such bad timing! Rebuffing Tom . . . of all the opportunities I could have taken, Jayna reproached herself. He didn’t bother to explain . . . just assumed. She flushed the toilet unnecessarily as though eradicating her response to his request: Tom, I can’t possibly find time until the end of the month. Send it to Benjamin, as is. He’d retorted: FU2. Thanks for nothing, wonder woman.

  I didn’t know he was in a rush, going on holiday. How stupid of him to drown!

  What, she wondered, were the chances of Tom’s death? In the entire working population of the Grace Hopper Building she’d expect a premature fatality . . . once a year? But at Mayhew McCline, with only forty-five employees, the chance of anyone drowning was so small it was technically . . . She stopped herself and opened the door.

  It was never negligible, it was always there. She turned the tap, too far, and water shot out from the basin. Accidents simply happened.

  The kitchen became the unofficial, designated space for commiserations and the occasional sobbing over Tom as though the analysts were protecting their office space from permanent stains of association. Jayna observed Eloise zigzagging through the department with a condolence card. She averted her eyes as each person hesitated with pen poised. Eloise didn’t bring the card to Jayna. Hester, chief analyst, announced she was installing herself for the morning in Benjamin’s quiet room and they all knew what she’d be doing—she’d inform colleagues in London about Tom’s death and speak to his personal business contacts, get them reassigned to other analysts. Jayna imagined ripples of concern of varying magnitude spreading from all these subsidiary nodes. No such after-effects from her stick insect’s demise.

  She brought up Tom’s files on her array. And immediately closed them. Instead, she pulled up her own studies and began drilling through her energy data sets. Hydrogen, she decided, was worth a closer look. She interrogated the data on hydrogen car ownership, rotated the charts and geographical visuals—global, continental, and regional—and calculated a trend for global hydrogen car ownership over the past five-years. Next, she searched for a correlation with individual variables in other data sets: disposable income for the same period, fresh fruit exports, per capita holiday spending, a host of commodity production figures, wholesale energy prices . . . thirty-seven variables in all. Her array flashed, cycling through regressions and wildly fluctuating figures for statistical significance. She brushed twenty-one possibilities aside. Playing with combinations of the remaining variables, she derived seventeen relationships. A fair start, she thought. By instinct, she assigned a weighting for each variable and began her quest for the perfect curve, one that matched the five-year historical trend. And as she adjusted the weightings, the curves began their shape shifting. Benjamin appeared at Jayna’s shoulder. “How can you take it all in? I feel sick just watching.”

  But Jayna refused the interruption. She was closing in but the match simply wasn’t good enough. There was nothing to flag up, as yet, for Benjamin. Definitely needed more variables. She could, at this stage, submit a bland sector summary on hydrogen, but anyone could do that. No, she wanted nothing less than a full investment strategy. Worth spending the extra time. She checked her own performance statistics. On average, over her six months’ service to date, she’d concluded three projects a week, quadruple the frequency of anyone else in the department. Yes, she could afford to spend more time on hydrogen.

  Sitting in the park, as she always did after work on Monday, she threw crumbs to her left and right and occasionally ahead of her. Such simple creatures. Each time she flicked her wrist, she reckoned only one or two pigeons espied the flight of stale scraps. She tested her theory by throwing crumbs to her far right. One pigeon twisted around, reacting in the instant. Correct. The other pigeons followed as though a switch had been thrown in each of their tiny brains. Jayna threw to the far left. Again, a single cadger tracked the new trajectory. Leading one minute, subservient the next.

  Bother! Maybe she should have rewritten Tom’s report. She shook out the remaining crumbs from her paper bag. But she’d been right to consider her own productivity. It was all getting way out of hand. I know now what I should have done. She flattened the paper bag against her thigh and made quarter folds. From the outset I should have allocated the time I spent on his jobs to his timesheet, not mine, without asking him. He’d have thought twice, then, about asking for help.

  The birds were in a frenzy. Their heads jabbed, jabbing the air as they jerked along, jabbing at the crumbs on the ground. Jayna examined the evidence of their mishaps—empty eye sockets, stump feet, trailing feathers—and noticed that two of the birds were verging on obese.

  And as for Eloise and her father, she rolled her eyes to the treetops, I still get it wrong.

  On the way to her residence in Granby Row, she stopped by the garish menu boards at the Jasmin Five Star Tandoori Restaurant and examined the names of the dishes: King Prawn Vindaloo, Aloo Methi, Bindi Bhaji, Baroa Mozaa. A waiter hovered in the doorway, so she turned away before he could begin his entreaties. No point wasting his time. And, rejoining the mid-afternoon crowds ambling in the hot spring breeze, she thought about her work colleagues who went back to their own kitchens in their own homes at the end of each day. She wondered if they, too, gave names to all their meals.

  The incessant street projections begged the city workers to delay their journeys home. They showed trailers for the latest films intercut with clips of star karaoke performers, all aimed at sucking the more impressionable commuters towards the downtown Entertainment Quarter and the Repertory Domes. As the crowds neared their metro stops, high-kick dancers were scorched across the city skyline in a last-ditch attempt to prevent anyone leaving. Jayna lowered her gaze and scrutinized the footwear worn by pedestrians who rushed towards her or cut across her path. Today, she looked for shoes that demanded attention; shoes that demanded she look up to see the wearer’s face. And in these faces she searched for any indication that they returned her curiosity. It didn’t happen. So she stared directly into the eyes of oncoming pedestrians but she failed again; she couldn’t force any connection.

  She entered her residence by the side door and climbed the scrubbed stairway to her single-room quarters on the second floor, just as she had done every working day for the previous twenty-six weeks. She changed into her loose clothes and hung her suit in the narrow, open-fronted wardrobe by the sink. Dropping onto her single bed
, she closed her eyes. A difficult day. She assessed her options beyond the routine of taking a shower and dining with the other residents. She could (a) chat in the common room with her friends; (b) relax alone in her room until lights out; or (c) continue her private studies. She admitted that (b) and (c) amounted to pretty much the same thing.

  “How rare is drowning at the age of thirty-four?” Jayna said as soon as Julie seated herself at the dining table. With Julie’s job at the Pensions Agency, she’d know the figures.

  “Confidential . . . but not as rare as you might think.”

  Harry and Lucas briefly looked up from their meals to acknowledge Julie’s remark. These four were the only diners. They ate one hour earlier than the rest of the residents at C7 because their working day was shorter by one hour. Jayna explained about Tom.

  “If you consider all accidental deaths between ages thirty and thirty-five,” Julie continued, “the figures are also far higher than anyone would guess. We’ve done a study. It seems people’s natural instincts on risk are very poor.”

  “Care to disassemble?” said Harry.

  “I’m talking historically . . . When primitive man lived on the savannah, the risk of accidental death was high but the types of risk were limited in number. Our intuition on certainty and uncertainty was formed then. Totally inadequate now. Life’s too complex.”

  “Is that a problem?” said Lucas. He was the new boy.

  “Yes and no. Obviously, if people underestimate certain risks they’ll make decisions with unfortunate outcomes. But—” she paused and looked around her friends “—if everyone could grasp their true exposure to negative events there’d be . . . ramifications. People have to get on with life as though the risks aren’t there. That’s why everyone anticipates an average lifespan. I assume you all caught the latest news from National Statistics—ninety-nine years.”