Ghostwritten (45 page)

“It’s okay, Ma—” Liam began.

I sliced the air. “Sssssh!”

Liam showed me the palms of his hands like he was calming a scared animal. “It’s either Father Wally, Maisie, or Red come to milk Feynman.…”

I shook my head. They’d have knocked once, if at all, and walked in.

“Who was on the
St. Fachtna
with you this morning? Any Americans?”

There was another rattle of knocking. “Hello?” A woman. Not Irish, not English.

I put my finger over my lips, and tiptoed up the stairs. They creaked.

A mouth to the letterbox. “G’day? Anyone home?”

“Morning to you,” said John. “Just a moment …”

I slid into the bedroom and looked for somewhere to hide the black book. Where, Mo? Under the mattress? Eat it?

I heard John opening the door. “Sorry to keep you.”

“No worries. Sorry for the bother. I’m walking to this row of stones on the map here. Map reading was never my strong point.”

“The stone row? Piece of cake. Go back down the drive, turn left, and just follow the sign to Roe’s bridge. All the way until the road peters out. Then you’ll see it. Unless the mist has other plans.”

“Thanks a million. Too bad about this rain, eh? It’s like winter back home.”

How can John be so calm? “Where is home? New Zealand?”

“That’s right! Halfmoon Bay, Stewart Island, south of the South Island. Know it?”

“Can’t say I do. ’Fraid the weather’s a law unto itself, here. Tropical rainstorms, raining frogs … Gales later though, the fishing forecast said earlier. Winter’s around the corner.”

“Just my luck. Say now, you’re a lovely dog! A him or a her?”

“A her. Planck.”

“As in thick as a?”

“As in the physicist who discovered why you can sit in front of a fire and not be incinerated by the ultraviolet catastrophe.”

Nervous laugh. “Oh, right,
that
Planck. Mild-mannered beastie for an island dog.”

“It’s her job. She’s my guide dog.”

The usual awkwardness. I relaxed. A pursuer would know about John. Unless she was just a good actress. I tensed up.

“You mean, er, you’re …”

“…    as a bat. A lot blinder than a bat, actually. I’m unequipped with sonar.”

“Strewth … there was I … I’m sorry.”

“No need.”

“Well, I’d better get to the row of stones before the gales blow ’em over.”

“Take your time. They’ve been there three thousand years. Mind how you go.”

“ ’Bye. Thanks again.”

I watched her walk down the drive. A youngish woman with red hair and a lemon raincoat. She looked over her shoulder, and I pulled away from the window. Could she have noticed the third coffee cup? I heard Liam and John talking in hushed voices downstairs. I watched the mist drifting in from the Calf Islands.

The sky over the Mount Gabriel was beaten dark and threatening. Liam and I were making a stew with some late turnips from the garden. John was tuning his harp. The stew bubbled in the pot.

Liam crumbled in a stock cube. “What are you going to do, Ma?”

“Add some more garlic.”

“You know what I’m talking about. Are they coming for you?”

“Aye, I think they are.”

“And are you going to go with them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you come back to Clear if you know they’ll track you here?”

“Because I needed to see you pair.”

“You need a plan.”

“By all means I need a plan.”

“So, what are your options?”

Liam sounded like my father. “One. Burn the black book and turn quantum cognition to ash. Change my name to Scarlett O’Hara, plant beans, keep bees for the rest of my life, and hope that the CIA is too stupid to look for me on the island of my birth. Two. Spend the rest of my life backpacking in hot countries, wearing sandals and tie-dyed trousers. Three. Go and live in a place in Texas that is not on maps, earn vast prestige and money by accelerating the new arms race fifty years, and see my son and my husband only under escort to ensure I don’t defect.”

Liam chopped his onion deftly. “Aye, that’s a thorny one.”

•  •  •

Kowloon brewed, stewed, and simmered. My nonlocality virtual equations were holding. My peaceful gone-to-earth exile’s life couldn’t last.

I remember the moment it ended. A gecko had appeared on the screen. Its tongue flickered like electricity. Hello, tiny lifeform of star compost, did you know that your lizardly life, too, is billiarded this way and that by quantum scissors, papers, and stones? That your particles exist in a time-froth of little bridges and holes forever going back and around and under itself? That the universe is the shape of a donut, and that if you had a powerful enough telescope you would see the tip of your tail?

Do you care?

Male shouting flared up from nowhere, and exploded in seesawing Cantonese. Women pitched in a couple of octaves higher. Tipped-over furniture walloped. The lampshade in my room swayed.

“What the fuck was that?” Huw stumbled through in his Daffy Duck boxer shorts and Mr. Mole glasses, tripping over his Indonesian drum kit. “Fuck.”

A gun fired! I jumped as if it had gone off in my pocket. “Sweet Jesus!”

The whole building was quiet as death.

Huw checked that the bolts and chain were securely fastened. The gecko was long gone.

A sickening sense that this was coming for me. I was gnawing my knuckles.

Thunder fell headlong down the stairs—and stopped. There were at least three sets of footfalls. Huw picked up a baseball bat. I picked up a scale plaster model of John Coltrane, and with utter calmness I knew that I had never been this petrified in all my life. Very luckily for us, the thunder carried on down. Huw went towards the window but I instinctively pulled him back. His eyes were astonished. “Fuck,” he said, a third time. The only three swear words I’d ever heard from Huw.

The wart on my thumb was growing.

The phone rang. Leave me alone. Leave me alone.

John was nearest. “Hello?”

My throat was dry.

“Tamlin …”

Tamlin Sheehy. Calm down, Mo. No newcomers to Clear Island today.

“Yes, Liam tied the tarpaulin down. They’ll be fine. Thanks for asking. She would, would she? Okay … Mind how you go.…”

John cupped the receiver. “Hey loverboy, Bernadette wants to murmur sweet nothings.”

“Da! She’s frightmare! Don’t you dare!”

“Don’t be rotten. You’ve got the lure of the exotic. You’ve been to Switzerland.”

John smiled twistedly and spoke back into the receiver. “Just a mo there, Bernadette, he’s just coming. He was in the shower. He’s just toweling himself dry for …”

Liam half-snarled, half-hissed, and took the phone into the hallway, shutting the door on the cord.

We listened to the radio over dinner.

“Have you noticed,” said John, “how countries call theirs ‘sovereign nuclear deterrents,’ but call the other countries’ ones ‘weapons of mass destruction’?”

“Yes,” I said.

The wind rose and fell like mountains at sea. The glass rattled. Liam yawned, and so did I. “One game to me, one game to you. Will Feynman be okay?”

“He will. He huddles down behind his boulder. Where’s your da?”

“In his study, meditating.”

Liam started putting away the Scrabble. “It’s going to be a harsh winter, Maisie was telling me. Long-range weather forecast.”

“Maisie? Has she got satellite TV installed?”

“No, her bees told her.”

“Ah, the bees.”

•  •  •

The Chinese policeman was unexpectedly tall and civil. A lieutenant from the old Prince of Wales guard, he knew about Huw’s work. He wrote down our versions of the raid in his notebook, and sipped iced tea. An ink-devil of sweat soaked itself into his shirt.

“I should tell you that the burglars wanted to know where were hidden the
gwai los
. Your neighbors said there no
gwai los.”

“Before or after the gun was fired?” I asked.

“After. They lied for you.”

Huw puffed out his cheeks. “What are you thinking, officer?”

“Two possibilities. One. They thought the apartment of
gwai lo
s had better things to steal. Two. Mr. Llewellyn, you are investigating the accounts of powerful companies. Might they include some Triad links?”

“Show me a company in Hong Kong that doesn’t have Triad links.”

“Foreigners don’t live in neighborhoods like this, especially white ones. Discovery Bay is more secure.”

I went into the kitchenette. In the opposite tenement the blinds were rolling down as the excitement subsided. Eyes everywhere. Eyes, eyes.

I remembered my conversation with the Texan. I knew who the “burglars” were and what they had come for. Next time they wouldn’t mistake the British, American, and Chinese systems of labeling floors.

I hadn’t touched a piano since Switzerland. I played a passable aria from the Goldberg Variations.

Liam played a gorgeous “In a Sentimental Mood.”

John half-improvised, half-remembered. “This one’s the crow on the wall.… This one’s the wind turbine.… This one’s …”

“Totally random notes?” suggested Liam.

“No. It’s the music of chance.”

“The wind’s really getting up! Maybe there’ll be no boats tomorrow either, Ma?”

“Maybe so. So tell me about Uni, Liam.”

“They’ve got some cool electron microscopes. I’m doing my first-year thesis on superliquids, and I’ve been playing synths in a band, and—”

“—deflowering maidens,” butted in John through a mouthful of sausage. “According to Dennis.”

“It’s not fair, Ma.” Liam turned red as a beetroot. “He speaks to Professor Dannan once a week.”

“As I have done for the last twenty years. Why should I stop just because he’s your tutor?”

Liam harrumphed, and walked over to the window. “It looks like the end of the world out there.”

Schroedinger came in through the cat flap, and looked around hypercritically.

“What, cat?” asked Liam.

Schroedinger chose John’s lap in which to exact tribute. The storm battered the island.

“I’m a shade concerned about our Kiwi visitor.” John picked up the telephone. “Mrs. Dunwallis? This is John. I’m just phoning to check whether or not your Kiwi visitor got back to the hostel safe and sound.… She called in here earlier, asking for directions to the stone row, with the gales, I was worried.… Are you sure? Of course you’re sure.… No idea. Mrs. Cuchthalain’s at Roe Bridge? Sure … will do.”

“What’s up, Da?”

“No New Zealanders at the Youth Hostel.”

“She must have just been a day tripper, then.”

“Billy wouldn’t risk taking
St. Fachtna
over to Baltimore in this weather.”

“She’s still on the island then. She must have taken shelter in the village.”

“Aye. There’s a logical explanation.”

I felt hollow. I was afraid there was a very logical explanation.

John and I were in our firelit bedroom. Liam was in the bath having a long soak, after e-mailing a girl in Dublin whose name we couldn’t tease out of him. John massaged my feet as thunder galloped by. I watched the sphinxes and the faces and flowers in the
bedroom’s fireplace. The physics and chemistry of fire only add to its poetry. This way of living was so normal to Clear Islanders. Mo, why are evenings like this so rare for you?

I am the ancient mariner: that black book is my albatross.

“What am I going to do, John? When they get here?”

“Mo, let’s cross that one when we get to it.”

“I don’t even know if I should cross it at all.”

On the third day I knew where I was before I opened my eyes. The black book was safe. Yesterday’s storms were long gone, the early sunlight lit the curtains, ending its twenty-six-minute journey on the jiggleable electrons in my retina. The wind was brisk, the sky was bright and cloud shadows slid over Roaringwater Sound and the three Calf Islands. Planck was barking. Thousands of Arab children were gamboling into the sea, steam hissing off their burns. A noise on the stairs made me turn around. The Texan filled the doorframe. He clicked the safety catch off and aimed the gun at the black book, then at me. “We need Quancog to rise again, Dr. Muntervary.” He winked at me as he pulled the trigger.

I lay there for twenty minutes, calming down. The early sunlight lit the curtains.

John’s eyeballs rolled under his eyelids, seeing something I couldn’t.

Our very first morning together in this house, this room, this bed, was our first morning as husband and wife. Twenty years ago! Brendan had constructed the bed, and Maisie had painted the Michaelmas daisies along the headboard. The bedding was from Mrs. Dunwallis, who’d stuffed the pillows from her own geese. Aodhagan Croft itself was a wedding present from John’s Aunt Cath, who had gone to live with Aunt Triona in Baltimore. No electricity, no telephone, no sewage tank. My own parents’ house in the sycamore trees was still standing, but the floorboards and rafters had rotted right through, and we didn’t have the money to reverse dereliction.

Besides Aodhagan we had John’s harp, my doctorate, a crate
of books that had been my da’s library, and a cartload of tiles and whitewash lugged up from the harbor by Freddy Doig’s horse. My job at Cork University didn’t begin until the autumn term. I’ve never felt such freedom since, and I know I never will again.

Down in the kitchen the telephone rang. Leave me alone, leave me alone.

To my surprise Liam was already up and had answered it before the third ring. “Oh, hi, Aunt Maisie … Yeah, they’re still in bed, on a morning like this, can you believe it? Bone idle or what? Uni’s fine … Which one? Nah, she’s history, I knocked that one on the head weeks ago.… Not literally, no. Right, I’ll tell ’em when they drag themselves down. Okay.”

I left John asleep. I hobbled downstairs, the stairs and my ankles creaking. “Morning, First-Born.”

“Only-Born. That was Aunt Maisie. She told me to say ‘Kilmagoon’ to you. She’s cleaning the pipes in the bar, but will be going to Minnaunboy to cut Sylvester’s hair later. Nicky O’Driscoll’s privy got blown away in the gale, and Maire Doig caught a monster conger eel. She’s suffering from gossip deprivation. Sleep okay?”