Speed of Light, The

by Cowley, Joy

  NUMEROLOGY has a history that goes back 10,000 years. It is part of Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Hebrew and Chinese traditions. The Chaldeans, Mayans, Tibetans, Phoenicians and Celts also used systems of numerology to understand nature. The numerology we know today is based on the work of the Greek mathematician Pythagoras, who believed that each number from 1 to 9 represents a universal principle. It is said that these numbers have vibrations that represent all stages of evolution. Significant numbers are birth dates and names.

  Jeff knew he had dreamed of his brother, but the moment he opened his eyes, details of the dream were destroyed by two words that came large into his head. Barbecue cover! He sat up in bed and lifted the edge of the curtain. It was morning. The wind and rain were less, but the yard was a mess of drowned leaves, twigs, bits of paper and plastic, a piece of corrugated cardboard stuck in the cactus garden. He deliberately hit his head against the window sill and groaned with another pain. He had forgotten his promise to Eddie to tie the cover down!

  He ran out in pyjamas and bare feet, through the dining room dark with curtains and still smelling of Winston’s cigar, out the glass doors and into greyness, cold rain and mess. He looked around. Leaves, old shopping bags, the lid of an ice-cream container. Where had all this stuff come from? The sky was dark, weighed down by water, and the harbour, the same colour, was full of rolling waves, not a boat to be seen. He walked carefully through the rubbish, and past the pool solid with flotsam – leaves like dirty brown snow, small sticks, an empty orangeade bottle. It would take ages to clean. And there it was, the barbecue, wet but still standing – without its cover.

  Eddie had asked him and he’d said yes, then run into the house when he heard the car, not wanting Winston to see him talking to Eddie, and now it was likely Eddie would get fired anyway, because the barbecue cover was brand new, one of those padded jobs, super waterproof, and it would be Eddie’s fault because Jeff had let him down.

  For a moment he stood breathless, then he had another thought. The new cover was heavy. The wind had lifted it off the barbecue but it couldn’t have gone far, not out of the property, surely. It would be okay. Just lying somewhere. He could put it back.

  The rain no longer beat the earth. It was a spray that shifted direction with the wind, but it still soaked him to the skin. He walked faster round the pool, searching the concrete boundary. On each side of the house the wall was high, over three metres with metal spikes on top that were supposed to look ornamental. There was a bit of plastic pinned against two spikes, but no sign of the barbecue cover. He walked on, past the shed, around the corner of his bedroom, and then he stopped.

  Near the gate, a eucalyptus branch had broken. It hadn’t come off the tree but was hanging down, a fan of small branches pinning some dark cloth to the concrete. His mind said barbecue cover. He wanted it to be that, but he knew the stuff under those gum leaves was the wrong colour.

  Closer, it looked like a bag of rubbish that had blown over the wall and landed under the tree, spilling trash.

  Rain drifted against his face, and there was a strange feeling in his ears, a swelling, popping sensation as though there had been a sudden change in pressure. He swallowed to clear it, and walked to the tree.

  He saw a white foot, shining wet, sticking out from the leaves.

  He didn’t breathe, didn’t think. It seemed the wind and rain stopped – time, too – everything frozen like a painting with him in it. Then his body wanted air. He gulped, stepping backwards.

  The thing under the gum tree branch was a dead body.

  * * *

  Only Helen put on her dressing gown. The rain glued Winston’s tartan pyjamas to his skin and he was having a problem seeing without his glasses. “Jeffrey! Don’t just bloody well stand there!” he yelled as he struggled to pull away the branch. “Give us a hand!”

  Jeff could see, but couldn’t move. The dead thing was an old woman with a head like a skull, wet grey hair sticking to it. Her mouth was open, a turned-down crescent, showing some black-edged teeth, and her eyes, not quite closed, had a wet shine. She was thin, mostly wet cloth, had some sort of coat with a wet pink scarf and trousers wrapped around skinny legs.

  The gum tree branch wanted to swing back. Winston held on, his bare feet skidding in the wet, his toes close to the old head. “Jeffrey?” he bellowed.

  It was Andrea who ran and grabbed the woman’s feet, dragging her away from the branch. The coat and trousers rolled up the body showing grey-white skin. The head fell sideways and they heard a small, high-pitched squeak.

  “She’s alive,” said Andrea. She leaned over and put two fingers against the wrinkled neck. “Yes! There’s a pulse! Call an ambulance!”

  But Winston was already on his phone to the police. “I want to report a break-in. A homeless person. What? How the hell would I know? This is a gated property and the gate’s still shut.”

  Andrea looked at her mother. “Ambulance!” she said.

  Knowing that the person was alive made a difference to Jeff. The knots of shock in him unravelled, and strength came back to his arms and legs. He ran into the house to fetch a cushion and a blanket, and he even put the cushion under the head when Andrea lifted it up. The wet hair was thin. He could see the scalp with wrinkles above the ears, and there were hardly any eyebrows and eyelashes. The face had folded in on itself, skin tight against bone, but the neck was loose and saggy. Helen opened an umbrella and had Jeff hold it over the woman’s face.

  “We should take her inside out of the rain,” said Andrea.

  “No!” said Winston. “She stays here until the police arrive.”

  “Your father’s right,” said Helen. “If we move her we might make her injuries worse.”

  Winston leaned over, until his head was under the umbrella. He shouted, “How! Did! You! Get! In!”

  “Sweetie, she can’t hear you,” said Helen.

  “I need to know.” Winston’s look was urgent. “Are you telling me she got in here on her own? How! Tell me how! It’s gang related, I’ll bet my life on it. There’s a mob of them and she’s the decoy.”

  “Dad, there’s no one else here,” said Andrea. “Why don’t you go and get changed?”

  “We’re waiting for the police.” Winston clenched and unclenched his fists, then he spun around to face Helen. “What’s the bet it was that fag gardener! He let her in!”

  Helen and Andrea exchanged glances, a shuttered look that Jeff could not interpret, and Helen said to Winston, “Go inside! You have to be at the airport at eleven.”

  Winston’s eyes were wide. “Don’t bloody patronise me! My instinct about this is right!” He pointed at the figure on the ground. “She is not some pathetic old homeless lady who got lost. There’s a whole lot more to this!”

  Helen folded her arms and walked away. Winston also marched off, but not into the house. He was going to search every part of the property, including the basement and the sheds, to see what had been stolen.

  The woman on the ground did not seem to be breathing but Andrea assured Jeff she was still alive. “Actually, her pulse is stronger,” she said.

  Jeff shifted the umbrella. The air smelled of wet gum leaves. The rain was not heavy now but it was persistent, and drops plopped off the umbrella spokes in a circle around the woman’s head. Andrea was kneeling by the woman, but looking up at Jeff. He wanted to talk to her about Beck. He looked over his shoulder to see where his mother was, then he said in an urgent whisper, “Where did you put the letter?”

  “Sorry. I left it at school. I’ll bring it home tonight, but don’t let them see it. It’s good news.”

  “Yeah?”

  She smiled. “They’re extraditing him. He’s coming back to New Zealand.”

  The umbrella flipped and water poured over his bare feet. “For real?”

  “He thinks so. Probably be the new prison near Auckland.”

  He wanted to run, shout, jump up and down. This was more than good news. It was a miracle. Beck was comi
ng home! He waved the umbrella. “Yay! We’ll be able to see him!”

  Andrea’s head turned, her eyes flickered, her smile disappeared. “No, Squidge! We have to go to school this morning. Dad will be going to the airport to meet Mr Staunton-Jones – won’t you, Dad?”

  Jeff gulped back his excitement. Winston was immediately behind them, still in his wet pyjamas. Their father’s eyes were wide with triumph. He had discovered the barbecue without its cover, evidence that they’d been robbed!

  * * *

  When the ambulance and the police car arrived, Winston was the only one still in his pyjamas. He looked like a wet dog, the grey hairs on his chest plastered between the buttons, and when Jeff offered him the umbrella, he pushed it away, as though it would somehow impede the investigation. The police officers, a man and a woman, had their own umbrella, the man holding it and asking questions while the woman made notes on a pad.

  Winston was losing patience with the questions, which seemed to Jeff to be a bit pointless. Are you sure none of you have seen this lady before? Did one of you open the electronic gate unintentionally? Could she have been a passenger in your car? Is it possible that the storm caused the gate to default and it opened by itself?

  The paramedics took off the wet blanket and put a yellow waterproof sheet over the old woman’s body and an oxygen mask over her nose. Kneeling on either side, they peeled away the pink scarf and examined her carefully before putting her on a stretcher. One of the paramedics said to the police officers, “My guess is somewhere between eighty and eighty-eight. No obvious fractures. Hypothermia and maybe concussion. She could have dementia.”

  The other paramedic said, “Sometimes they wander off and get lost.”

  “She couldn’t get in here without help!” Winston pointed a finger like a gun. “There’ll be more of them. Thieving louts! They come from the outer suburbs. That’s how they work – in packs.”

  The male officer looked at his notes. “You said you searched the property and saw no one else.”

  “They would have got away,” Winston argued. “The able-bodied went back over the wall and she was left behind.”

  “Is there anything missing?”

  “No, Officer, there isn’t,” said Helen.

  “Yes, there is, the new cover for the barbecue,” Winston said, but he didn’t convince anyone, not even himself, and when the officer suggested that it could have blown away in the storm, he didn’t reply. Instead he pointed again to the woman who was now on the stretcher and being wheeled towards the ambulance. “Have you searched her pockets?”

  “Yes.” One of the paramedics opened a wet plastic bag and showed a plastic comb, a lace-edged handkerchief and a sodden pack of indigestion tablets. “No identification,” he said.

  “She’ll be missing somewhere,” said the woman officer. “We’ll phone around the rest homes.”

  “All night pinned under that branch!” Andrea said. “How did she survive the storm?”

  The paramedic smiled. “Not all night. A few hours, perhaps. We’ll get her to the hospital for assessment.”

  Jeff asked, “Will she get better?”

  “Probably. It’s hard to tell. It wouldn’t be the first time a patient with dementia has wandered off in a storm and got lost. They can get unsettled.”

  “A storm like this unsettles everyone.” The male police officer extended a hand to Winston. “It was a chaotic night. I suggest, sir, that you go inside and get warm, and if you have any further concern, you might like to set your mind at rest by having your electronic gates checked.”

  “Did you hear that?” said Winston, as they walked back to the house. “Did you listen to the way that bloody young pipsqueak talked down to me?”

  “Have a shower, sweetie,” said Helen. “Andrea? Jeffrey? Grab your books and a bite to eat. You’re going to be late for school.”

  Winston squelched across the white marble floor. “I’ll get to the truth of it if it’s the last thing I do! Dementia, my foot! What a load of rubbish!”

  Helen picked up her car keys. “Darling! Shower! Your Warren Staunton-Whatsit is halfway across the Tasman and you’re not even dressed. I’m off to work.”

  He turned, his mouth open to say a whole lot more, but Helen had her bag and umbrella and was striding towards the garage.

  Jeff climbed in the back of his mother’s Audi. Andrea got in the front. The garage door opened on the sodden mess left by the storm, and the car backed out and turned. The white-barked branch of the eucalyptus tree was still hanging, branches on the drive like a giant broom, but everything else about the morning had receded into a dream. The rain had even washed away the tracks of the police wagon and the ambulance.

  Helen and Andrea were talking about the man who was flying across from Sydney, neither of them able to remember if he preferred tea or coffee, but Jeff, gazing out at the passing of broken trees and wet earth, could not get the old woman out of his mind. Somehow, she was connected with all the old ladies from childhood fairy tales, the one who lived in a shoe, the one who swallowed a fly, the wild witches from Snow White and Hansel and Gretel. That wasn’t logical, of course, but then neither was an elderly woman inside a gate that could not be opened from the outside. He looked at his watch, counting the seconds down the hill to the main street: forty-one, six seconds longer than usual due to debris on the road.

  His father could be right. There was more to this than anyone knew, only Jeff was sure it wasn’t about vandalism or theft.

  * * *

  Jeff wasn’t the only student who was late. Nearly everyone had been affected by the storm and some didn’t get in because roads were blocked or trains delayed. There was no damage to the school, but a drain outside the staffroom had blocked, causing a flood that went halfway across the tennis courts, water deep enough for what Mrs Wilson called high jinks. Until she came out and stopped it, some kids were ankle deep, kicking water at those who tried to get by, scoring points when they gave someone a face wash. Jeff got a face wash but he barely noticed it. Too many other things were jostling for attention in his mind.

  Paul Fitzgibbon said his uncle’s neighbour had a yacht blown off its mooring and onto the rocks at Evans Bay. “Did your place get any damage?”

  “Yes.” Then he corrected himself. “No. Not really.”

  Paul looked a question at him.

  “There was this weird thing.” Jeff stopped, because now it was so weird, he knew it couldn’t have happened – at least, not in the way he had witnessed it.

  “Like what?” said Paul.

  “We discovered an old lady lying under our gum tree.”

  “A what?”

  “One of the branches fell on her and she was soaking wet. Unconscious. The ambulance came. The paramedics thought she might have dementia, you know, forgotten where she was.” Jeff decided not to mention Winston and the police. “They took her to hospital.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “We don’t know. It was only this morning I found her. I thought she was dead.” A wave of coldness went up his back and shuddered in his shoulders. “We don’t know how she got in. The gate was locked and the walls are way too high for climbing. She was really little and thin.”

  “The storm!” said Paul. “A tornado picked her up and dumped her in your place.”

  For a second, Jeff thought that possible, then he saw Paul’s smile.

  “You’re kidding,” he said.

  “Sure I’m kidding.” Paul put on his goofy smile, the one where he crossed his eyes, then he asked, “Did you do your patterns of equivalent fractions?”

  “What?”

  “Homework!”

  “Oh, yes.” He was glad that the subject had been changed. “Dead easy, wasn’t it?”

  “Kids’ stuff,” said Paul.

  * * *

  Jeff liked Mrs Wilson. As teachers went, she was near the top of the okay list, meaning she was interesting and she didn’t talk to them as though they were all wearing diapers. True,
she tended to get off the subject and ramble a bit, but she had a wacky sense of humour. She laughed at them, and when she got too serious they laughed at her and she was cool with that. Jeff thought they were lucky to have her.

  “Right, boys, enough storm talk. Let’s pick up on yesterday. What is the world’s biggest ocean?”

  They all knew, so no one replied.

  She smiled. “And how big is the Pacific Ocean?”

  “One hundred and sixty million square kilometres,” said Jake Kohitolu.

  “Thank you, Jake. Actually it’s one hundred and sixty-nine point two million square kilometres, but maybe you measured it when the tide was out.” She gave him an extra smile. “And the deepest point in the Pacific Ocean?”

  “The Mariana Trench near the Mariana Islands,” he said.

  “Correct. The Mariana Trench north of Australia and south of the Philippines. The deepest ravine in the world! It’s two thousand, five hundred and fifty kilometres long, sixty-nine kilometres wide, and its depth – can anyone tell me its maximum depth?”

  No one replied. Jeff looked around the room, determined to keep his mouth closed. They were all supposed to know this.

  “Would someone like to guess?”

  Tawhiri Smallwood put up his hand. “As deep as the Grand Canyon?”

  Jeff exploded. “No! The Grand Canyon is eighteen hundred metres deep. The Mariana Trench is ten thousand, nine hundred and eleven metres at its deepest point.”

  Mrs Wilson beamed with pleasure. “Jeffrey Lorimer, you continue to astound me! How do you remember these figures?”

  He shrugged, unable to tell her. It wasn’t difficult. The deepest part of the trench came down to Beck’s number three. The Grand Canyon was his own number nine.

  She opened her computer and put diagrams on the board, comparing the great world rifts. “The Mariana Trench is six times the depth of the Grand Canyon. Imagine the challenge to explorers! Everest had been climbed many times! Men had walked on the moon! But no one got to the bottom of the Mariana Trench until March 2012. Can you tell me why?”