The Mirror World of Melody Black

by Gavin Extence

  So what did I know about her already? She’d done her Ph.D. under Professor Caborn five years ago. That made her thirtyish – easily within my range. She’d graduated from Liverpool, though she would have done her undergrad degree at Cambridge, I decided.

  What else? She was a primatologist, apparently, and a snappy dresser, evidently – too snappy to make a convincing scientist, perhaps. Oh, well. Not much I could do about that now. She’d have to be one of those rare science babes they find to present documentaries on BBC Four. It wasn’t difficult to imagine her dabbling in broadcasting. Maybe that’s what she was doing in Uganda?

  Hmm. Now that I thought about it, Uganda was another hole I’d dug for myself. On the one hand, the lie was exceptionally smart – lot of monkeys in Uganda – on the other, it was exceptionally problematic. Where the hell was Julia’s suntan? I briefly considered nipping into a salon for a swift spray-on, but there wasn’t the time. I’d told Sarah I was on my way. Much better if Dr Walters simply can’t tan. She has to slap on the factor 50 or she burns like a vampire. Plus I never said how long she’d been in Uganda. Maybe it was just a couple of days. Maybe she was like Professor Brian Cox and just flew to exotic locations to film a thirty-second soundbite then hopped on the next plane home.

  By the time I’d walked the mile or so to the psychology building, Julia Walters had a biography so intricate it could have been a Christmas bestseller. She was the second daughter of Paul and Annette Walters. Her father was a surgeon, her mother a human rights lawyer. She loved Thai food and was having a messy affair with her producer. And of course none of this was likely to come up in casual conversation. But it helped just to know it. It meant that when I walked up to reception, I was Julia Walters.

  There was only one woman sitting behind the desk, so that removed the first potential obstacle straight away. I held out my hand and smiled. ‘Sarah? Hello. Julia Walters. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Awful day to be stuck behind a desk.’

  It turned out that Julia was also quite a chatterbox.

  Sarah smiled back and took my hand. If she was at all surprised by the young, fair, fuchsia-clad doctor of primatology she found herself greeting, she gave no sign. I think I introduced myself with so much aplomb she had no choice but to be swept along in the colossal fantasy I’d unleashed.

  We chatted for a few minutes. I laughed and joked and gesticulated, made a couple of casual remarks about the job I’d just landed in Manchester. (‘The north suits my complexion!’)

  Uganda, sadly, never came up.

  Up the stairs, two lefts, a right, another left. The Department of Experimental Psychology turned out to be something of a maze. I never would have found Professor Caborn’s office without Sarah’s excellent directions. She would have shown me through herself, she said, were it not for the fact that she was the only person on reception and could not desert her post. This came as a relief. I felt that Sarah and I had bonded over the course of our two brief conversations, and the thought of her uncovering my deception was not a pleasant one.

  I passed a few people in the corridors. I strode confidently and made eye contact, smiled a polite, professional smile. The reassuring click of my heels echoed off the bare walls and floor.

  There was a toilet en route, where I took a couple of minutes to freshen up and reconfigure my mindset. I checked my appearance in the mirror – still fabulous – splashed cold water on my pulse points, urinated, and left Dr Walters in the cubicle like a forgotten umbrella. I was all Abigail again as I approached Professor Caborn’s office – the first of six on an unremarkable corridor illuminated by two fluorescent strips. His name was on the door in simple black lettering, just above a narrow rectangular window. But I wouldn’t have needed the sign; peering through the glass, I was able to extrapolate the back of his head from the photo I’d seen on his webpage. His hair was pearly white with just a touch of burned-charcoal grey at the temples. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbows. He was in a swivel chair at his computer, the screen commanding his full attention. I watched him for several moments, then checked my watch: 11.58; perfect timing. I straightened my back and knocked briskly on his door.

  ‘Come in.’ He said this before he’d started to spin his chair, and by the time he’d finished the half-turn, I was already in the room, greeting him with my most disarming smile.

  ‘Professor Caborn.’ I extended my hand and walked the three paces to his chair so he didn’t have to get up. ‘How nice to see you. Please forgive the intrusion.’

  ‘Er . . . no intrusion. I was just tidying up my inbox.’ He glanced at our clasped hands through oval spectacles, his forehead wrinkling. His lips were slightly parted, framed by his small, tidy beard. ‘Um, can I help you?’

  ‘Yes, I very much hope so. I’m Abigail.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Abigail . . .’ Professor Caborn withdrew his hand. He had the look of a man who had walked into a film halfway through and was trying to get a handle on the plot. I kept smiling, reassuringly. He returned the smile, then cleared his throat, very delicately. ‘I’m sorry: I feel like I should know who you are, but I don’t. I’m afraid I’m not very good with faces.’

  I laughed. ‘That’s quite all right. We haven’t met. You recognize me from my profile picture. I’ve emailed you a few times. Abigail Williams. I’ve come to take you to lunch.’

  ‘Oh. That’s . . . odd.’

  I shrugged. ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘Um, maybe a little. I’m not quite sure. This is . . . Abigail, would you take a seat for a moment?’ He gestured to the other chair in his office. It was against the wall, between an overfilled bookcase and a teetering stack of journals.

  ‘Yes, thank you. That’s very kind. I’ve just walked from the train station and I could do with taking the weight off my feet.’

  ‘Where have you come from?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘Just to see me?’

  ‘It’s only an hour. Not very far.’

  ‘Yes, but still. It’s . . .’ He trailed off.

  ‘Odd?’

  ‘Yes. Odd.’

  This conversation was going nowhere fast. I decided to lay my cards on the table. ‘Professor Caborn. I woke up at three o’clock this morning and decided to take a punt. I’ve come here hoping that you can spare just a small portion of your day to talk to me. But if you don’t want to, that’s fine too. I’m perfectly prepared to hop on the next train back to London, and I promise you’ll never hear from me again. Just say the word.’

  Professor Caborn didn’t say a thing. He looked like a man who’d been asked for his interpretation of an unyielding piece of modern art, all primary colours and abstruse geometry. I took his silence as leave to continue.

  ‘Good. I can see you’re at least interested.’

  He put a hand to his chin and glanced away for a few seconds as if turning this statement over in his mind, assessing its validity.

  I waited. A few more moments passed.

  ‘Coffee,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘I think I could manage a coffee.’

  ‘Wonderful.’ I rose from my chair. ‘So let’s go get a coffee. And maybe some cake?’

  Professor Caborn nodded, slowly, as if in a trance.

  I gestured to the door with my open palm. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Er, yes. I suppose I am.’ He switched off his monitor, stood up, and parked the swivel chair neatly under his computer desk.

  ‘Oh. Just one more thing,’ I said. ‘Will we be going out via reception?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I ask you a small favour? Sarah, the receptionist: well, I’m not especially proud of this, but I wasn’t sure she’d let just anyone in to see you. So I told her we were old colleagues, from Liverpool.’

  Professor Caborn digested this information. ‘I suppose that should seem odd too, but given everything else . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Fine. So we’re old colleagues. Anything else I should know?’

  ‘Yes:
I also told her my name was Dr Julia Walters.’

  ‘Dr Julia Walters?’

  ‘Yes. I’m a primatologist. You supervised my Ph.D. That’s how we know each other. Please don’t contradict this. She seemed nice and I’d hate to embarrass her.’

  Professor Caborn sighed at length. ‘Tell me, Abigail. Is this a normal day for you? Because it isn’t for me. I just wanted you to know that.’

  I could see where he was coming from, of course; on reflection, some of my actions that morning had been slightly eccentric. But what choice had he left me? I’d tried to arrange a meeting by conventional means. That had failed, so I’d decided to get a bit creative. Standard journalistic practice.

  ‘This isn’t an entirely abnormal day for me,’ I told him.

  Then we went for coffee.

  ‘I suppose you must need that?’ Professor Caborn twitched a nervous forefinger at my double espresso. ‘You mentioned you’ve been up since three. Unless you go to bed unusually early, I can’t imagine you’ve had much sleep.’

  I did the calculation in my head. ‘Three hours ten minutes, I think. Give or take. But I suppose it must have been deep sleep. It was one of those mornings when I just woke up fresh as a daisy. They happen to me sometimes, especially in the summer. I think it must be something to do with the light. That was something I was going to ask you about, actually. I have a theory – a hypothesis – that I’m hoping you might substantiate.’

  I smiled. I was letting my mouth run a bit, but I was confident that at least some of what I was coming out with might interest him. It was sciencey. We’d already covered the basic pleasantries: Oxford, the beautiful weather, the equally beautiful parkland that enveloped the Department of Experimental Psychology. But Professor Caborn still seemed slightly wary of me. I thought that talking science might help him to relax, and my insomnia seemed a relatively benign place to begin. I didn’t want to jump straight in at the deep end and start talking about Simon’s corpse.

  ‘So, my bedroom window faces east,’ I went on, ‘and my curtains are lousy, so summer is always a big problem. The room starts getting bright from about three in the morning, and by four, you might as well be trying to sleep in a solarium.’

  Professor Caborn processed this metaphor, then nodded that I should continue.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about evolution recently,’ I told him, ‘mostly on account of your work, and it got me wondering about how our minds have evolved – or haven’t evolved – to cope with extended daylight in the summer. I mean, we all came out of Africa, right, not so long ago, so presumably we’re not adapted to these big seasonal variations? Now that I think about it, I’m fairly sure I’ve always suffered with sleeping in the summer, whereas I can be a real dormouse in the winter. Perhaps I should hibernate?’

  Professor Caborn didn’t give me an answer to any of these questions straight away. Maybe it was just that he was an exceptionally deep thinker, and refused to open his mouth until he had every detail of his reply mapped out. Or maybe I was being rather impatient. In any case, his response seemed to take an unnecessary amount of time. I tapped my nails in sequence on the tabletop. Then, eventually, he said, ‘Tell me: how much do you know about circadian rhythms?’

  I answered instantly. ‘I’ve heard of them. However, it’s probably best if you assume, from this point on, that my knowledge of science is extremely limited. I think I understand how the toaster works, but not the microwave. Imagine that you’re talking to an intelligent twelve-year-old.’

  ‘Oh.’ Professor Caborn thought for a few more moments. ‘Well. Microwaves work by agitating the hydrogen atoms in water molecules. Food contains water, microwaves wobble some of the atoms in that water, and this makes the food hot. As for circadian rhythms, they refer to all the processes in animals and plants that recur on a cycle of approximately twenty-four hours. The normal sleeping-waking cycle is one such process. It is affected by light, in that light is one of the cues that inform our body clock. But because seasonal changes happen very slowly, we have plenty of time to get used to them, so few people are adversely affected. It’s possible, of course, that you’re unusually photosensitive. Or maybe something else is causing you to wake and then the morning sunlight is preventing you from getting back to sleep. Either way, you should probably get some thicker curtains.’

  I nodded intently. I should have put up thicker curtains a couple of years ago, when Beck and I first moved in together. But I’d never seen the flat as anything more than a temporary arrangement, a halfway house on the road to better things. Changing the curtains would have meant conceding that we were there for the long haul. Even now, I wasn’t sure I felt ready to do this.

  ‘You know,’ Professor Caborn was saying, ‘one of my colleagues, one of my real colleagues’ – he gave a small chuckle, which I supposed was a good thing; it meant he was coming to terms with the rather unorthodox way in which I’d engineered our meeting – ‘he once did some research into the effect of light cues on sleeping patterns. Basically, it involved isolating a couple of dozen volunteers for an extended period. They were kept in a completely sealed environment: no clocks, no daylight, no external clues whatsoever regarding the passage of time. His aim was to see if he could force them to adapt to an alternative sleeping-waking cycle, one based on an eighteen-hour day. They were given six hours of total darkness and twelve hours of bright light on a continual loop. It made a certain amount of sense as most people spend about one-third of their time asleep.’

  Professor Caborn seemed to drift off for a few moments, lost in thought. In the end, I had to prompt him. ‘So, what happened? Did it work?’

  ‘Oh, no, of course not. It was a total disaster. The twenty-four-hour clock is hardwired – that point was strongly reaffirmed. Within a week over half the subjects were experiencing hallucinations. Three of them developed full-blown psychosis. It all got rather messy towards the end. Of course, this was back in the 1970s. It was the era of the Stanford Prison Experiment and the like. Health and safety was an alien concept. Still, on the eighth day my colleague decided enough was enough and pulled the plug.’ Professor Caborn sighed heavily, then seemed to snap to, remembering where he was. ‘The point, as I’m sure you’ll see, is that you can’t take too many liberties with sleep. Not without suffering consequences.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Interesting as this sideline was, I’d decided it was time to move our conversation forward. ‘Professor Caborn. Let me tell you how I came to stumble on your work. It’s related to the insomnia in a slightly tangential way. My sleeping problems started about a month ago, when I found my neighbour’s body . . .’

  So, for the fourth time in as many weeks, I found myself giving a full account of that evening in Simon’s flat. Professor Caborn didn’t say a word. He just listened with his forehead creased, taking an occasional sip of coffee as I talked and talked. I was now very adept at telling the story. In truth, it felt like I was telling someone else’s story, in the same way that Professor Caborn could recount the details of his colleague’s sleep experiment. There was a certain amount of tension and drama woven through the narrative, but I still felt curiously insulated from the events I was recollecting.

  By the time I’d finished, Professor Caborn’s lips were pursed in concentration. ‘Let me check if I have this correct,’ he said after a few moments. ‘You found your neighbour dead. It was a strange but otherwise not very emotional experience. That night you couldn’t sleep. You happened upon some of my work, and now you’re in Oxford because . . . Actually, I’m still not entirely clear on this point. You’re here because . . . you’re trying to make some sense of this?’

  I thought about this for a couple of seconds. The connection between Simon’s death and my being in Oxford seemed perfectly obvious in my head, but this didn’t mean it was easy to explain to someone else. ‘I’m not sure I’m trying to make sense – not exactly. It’s more that I found your ideas interesting and felt compelled to follow them up. You see, this isn’t really my field. I
’m not a scientist.’ I jangled my turquoise bracelets, as if providing the necessary evidence to corroborate this claim. ‘Usually, I write about books, poetry, the odd bit of light cultural analysis. So this is a departure for me. I suppose I’m trying to examine this odd experience of mine as something that could only happen in a modern, urban context. I mean, for most of human history we must have lived in tight little communities. If your neighbour died – if anyone died – if you found yourself in the presence of a body, it would mean something. It would have some kind of emotional resonance. But what I experienced instead was this, this . . . I don’t know what. There’s probably not even a name for it.’

  ‘Cognitive dissonance?’ Professor Caborn suggested. ‘Are you familiar with the term?’

  ‘No, but I understand what the words mean. They seem rather apt.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Professor Caborn tapped his teaspoon against the rim of his empty coffee cup, then said, ‘Cognitive dissonance is the term psychologists use to describe a state of conflicting thoughts or emotions.’

  ‘Like ambivalence?’

  ‘No, it’s stronger than ambivalence. It’s more like trying to hold two mutually exclusive beliefs or feelings about the world. So in your case, for example, you hold a deep-rooted belief that life has, or should have, a certain value. But then you’re confronted with a situation that seems to contradict this. The result is a conflict of two opposing ideas. Cognitive dissonance. And this is likely to be felt more keenly if you usually think of yourself as a very moral or sensitive person.’

  ‘Hmm . . . I’m not sure I’d go that far.’

  ‘Or just a generally good person?’

  ‘Yes, perhaps. More good than bad.’ Today, at least, this seemed a plausible conjecture. ‘Cognitive dissonance.’ I tried the words aloud to hear how they sounded. ‘Would you say that’s a . . . normal response to finding your neighbour’s corpse?’

  Professor Caborn considered this for some time. ‘No, probably not. I mean, in a sense, cognitive dissonance is always an abnormal response – from a subjective standpoint. I shouldn’t worry too much about it, though. Concentrate on trying to get a good night’s sleep.’