“Thing I was wondering, Sir, was … well, I was reading in one of my father’s magazines that most of the universe is made up of stuff called dark matter and dark energy which you can’t see and can’t detect, and they know it’s there because the universe is expanding so much faster than it should be, but my question is – if you can’t see it or detect it, is it possible that dark matter isn’t made up of particles at all, and then couldn’t that mean that not everything that exists in the universe is made out of particles after all?”
There was what seemed like a very long silence, during which I conjured up a picture in my mind of me kicking myself – somehow – repeatedly on the rear end. How could I have been so bloody foolish as to draw attention to myself? It was better to stay invisible. The moment anyone noticed you, it gave them the chance to get you.
The words Beam me up, Scotty echoed through my head.
Eventually, after time seemed to stretch indefinitely, Dr Ojebande spoke.
“That’s a very good question, Nyman.”
I suppressed a smile. I looked over at Lloyd Turnbull, and he was grimacing.
“The answer, I suppose, is that it is perfectly possible that dark matter isn’t made of particles, since no one has ever seen it or measured it. But the very fact that it is pushing the universe apart so quickly means that it certainly has mass. And every body with mass we have ever come across in nature is made of particles. Ergo, I think we can safely assume that dark matter – if anybody ever finds out what it actually is – probably is made of particles. Dark particles, I suppose.”
He smiled – and that was it. No snide comments, no putdowns, nothing. He simply turned away and went back to teaching the lesson. I could hardly believe it. I had actually managed to please “Bandy”, as the other children called him.
Maybe things were going to start getting better at the school after all.
However, that idea lasted exactly as long as it took to get out of the classroom, when I heard Wayne Fleet shout something I didn’t understand at me across the corridor.
“Hey, DM. Nice to see that you’ve made friends with DE.”
He turned away laughing, and I saw that his companions were laughing with him. It took me precisely eight seconds to work out what they were laughing at.
DM and DE. Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
Me and Dr Ojebande.
It’s hard to keep feeling angry for very long, even if you’re quite badly upset, as I was. It was such a stupid thing for them to say. But then the hurt wasn’t in what they said, it was in the fact that they wanted to hurt me in the first place.
I decided to let it go. The way I saw it, everything is temporary. Even the biggest stars die. Feelings are more temporary than most things. You just have to wait for them to pass.
Also, I consoled myself by thinking that everything is in the past. Did you know, for instance, that when you look at the Sun, you’re seeing it as it was about eight minutes ago, because that’s how long it takes the light to get to the Earth? It seems such a strange thought. The Sun could have exploded five minutes ago, and you wouldn’t know a thing about it. You would still be happily sunbathing, not knowing you had three minutes to go before you were vaporized.
And if you look through a telescope at a planet like Saturn, you are seeing it as it was about an hour ago.
This leads on to other strange thoughts. Just imagine – for the sake of this explanation – that there was a giant orchestra playing on Saturn. Of course, there couldn’t be – it’s too cold and the atmosphere is poisonous and there’s no such thing as a giant orchestra. But if it was big enough to be seen through a telescope from Earth, you’d be able to see the musicians through the telescope performing a symphony, although actually on Saturn itself they might have finished the piece of music and gone back to the giant dressing room on the Sun to change clothes and go home.
Which is pretty strange. It means that everything you see – absolutely everything – is really in the past. By the time you see it, it has already taken place.
Which doesn’t make a difference if you’re only a few metres from someone, but when the distances are measured in light years, it has all sorts of weird implications.
(A light year is the distance light travels during one year. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second.)
For instance, it is a fact that many of the thousands of stars that you see when you look up in the sky have long ago burned out and disappeared altogether. All you’re seeing is left-over light.
If you were far enough away from Earth and could look back through a big enough telescope, you could see the Tudors and the Stuarts and even the dinosaurs. Because light never dies – it just keeps flowing out through the vacuum of space forever.
These thoughts, weird though they were, consoled me. By the end of the day, I had stopped feeling angry. However, I was feeling sad instead.
I found myself wandering through the streets of the town again. When I’m a bit down, I like reading books that are too young for me, so I went into a bookshop that specializes in children’s fiction and started reading one of the Moomin books by Tove Jansson. Even though they’re a bit babyish, I’ve always enjoyed the Moomins because they are so completely bizarre.
On this occasion, I was reading about this creature called the Groke, who was very lonely and made everything around her go cold when she came near. The Groke was a weird-looking thing with cold, staring eyes. She was shaped a bit like a platypus, only somewhat furry. She had a long row of teeth and a triangular nose, and she looked frightened all the time. She had a tail, but none of the Moomins had ever seen her tail. No one ever went near her. She moved very slowly but never stopped moving. Wherever she stood, the ground froze and plants died. All the Groke ever wanted was friendship and warmth, but everyone shunned her, and she spent most of her time in her cave on top of the Lonely Mountains.
Poor old Groke. Who could bear to live a life like that? All the same, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was really her own fault that nobody bloody liked her.
When I got home, I decided to try out my new power.
But before I did, out of habit, I checked my computer. And my sadness increased exponentially.
“Exponentially”, incidentally, means “growing rapidly”.
Lloyd Archibald Turnbull had posted a picture from a science book on his news feed. It was an illustration of the universe, highlighting “dark matter”. It showed a network of stars spread like veins in a body with dark patches in between. This was meant to be an artistic representation of what dark matter would look like if you could see it, which you can’t.
The caption, highlighted by Turnbull, included the words, “some scientists question whether dark matter even exists”. And he had added “Dark Matter Nyman”.
Obviously he was talking about me.
I trailed my cursor over to the unfriend button and clicked it, and then I did the same for the two Waynes. I was about to do the same for Susan Brown when I noticed that I had a message. I opened my inbox and saw that the message was from Susan Brown.
All it said was, “Lloyd Turnbull is a brain-dead numpty. Don’t take any notice of him.”
I was suspicious. Lloyd Turnbull had initially used indications of friendship in order to get under my skin, and it was quite possible that Susan Brown was doing exactly the same thing, perhaps under the aegis of Turnbull himself.
I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt for the moment and returned to thoughts of being invisible. I decided to find out what was tearing our family apart and if it was all my fault.
Since it was a Thursday, I was fairly sure that Peaches and Melchior would be staying home. Melchior played bridge on a Monday, sometimes they went to the cinema together on Tuesday, Peaches did yoga on a Wednesday and pilates on a Friday and anything at all could happen at the weekend. But nothing ever happened on a Thursday night. So they would be downstairs together, and as it was only a day after they had apparently come within a whis
ker of ending their marriage, I was sure they would discuss whatever it was that was causing problems between them.
I like to keep a fairly conservative bedtime schedule. I go to bed at around nine o’clock. I decided that after supper I would brush my teeth, put on my pyjamas, stick my head in the front room to say goodnight and then pretend to read to myself for a while as usual before turning out the light.
What I was actually going to do was throw myself headlong into the bedroom mirror.
And then my experiment could begin, so that I could start to accumulate some empirical evidence to test the validity of the following three hypotheses:
1. Peaches and Melchior were going through a difficult patch but were not about to separate.
2. Peaches and Melchior were, in fact, about to separate.
3. It was all my fault.
“Empirical”, incidentally, means “based on observation and experiment”. This is the opposite of making elaborate, clever guesses.
Empiricism means you have to build up a body of solid, verifiable evidence before you can start making predictions. If that involved me invading Peaches’ and Melchior’s privacy, that was simply a sacrifice they were going to have to make in the interest of scientific inquiry.
After all, they had invaded my privacy often enough – barging into my room without asking, checking my computer to make sure I hadn’t been accessing sexy websites, going through my pockets to see if there were any more forged sick notes. Now it was their turn, and I was going to employ the same defence they always used: it was for their own good.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE PARENT TRAP
At approximately 9.02 p.m., I rose from my bed, picked up How To Be Invisible, held it hard against the jacket pocket of my pyjamas and hurled myself at the mirror. A few minutes later, I was heading down the stairs into the hall.
Luckily, the door to the front room was open, so I didn’t have to wait until someone went in or came out. A door opening by itself would obviously have been extremely suspicious, and I needed no reminding that if I was found out, my power would immediately disappear.
Peaches and Melchior were just sitting there in front of the telly, with their dinner on little round wooden tables in front of them. The dinner hadn’t actually been cooked – it was one that you bought from a supermarket and heated up in the oven. It was Melchior’s night to cook and Peaches had made the sensible decision of insisting on something edible.
I was being as quiet as I could, and the television – a documentary about insects in the rainforest – was on quite loud, so I wasn’t too worried about being heard. But I needed to find a spot in the room where no one would have reason to collide with me.
There was a “dead” corner in the room, in a recess on one side of the fireplace, which no one ever had any reason to go into. There were no domestic appliances there, or even electrical plug sockets, neither were there any bookshelves. I walked very quietly over to that corner, hoping that the floorboards wouldn’t creak.
Although I couldn’t see the television directly, I could see its reflection in the mirror over the sofa that Peaches and Melchior were sitting on. On the screen, a beautiful, delicate, leopard-spotted butterfly was making its way between purple trumpet-shaped flowers. It was a very happy and idyllic scene.
Then a bird the size of a small cat and the colour of a rain cloud swallowed it whole.
I tried to put the image out of my mind and concentrate on Melchior and Peaches. Although I was directly in the eye-line of both, neither of them appeared to notice anything unusual, even though it sounded to me like my breath and my heartbeat were both making a deafening noise.
I stood in the corner of the front room for more than an hour, waiting for a conversation to start. But nothing happened. Not once did they speak. It was bloody boring. I tried to keep myself amused by watching the television in the mirror. On-screen, the carnage continued – big insects eating little insects, frogs eating big insects, giant spiders eating frogs. Nature was beautiful, but it was a slaughterhouse. Small things didn’t stand a chance.
The silence settled like snow. I was painfully aware of an “atmosphere” – a generalized, unspoken bad feeling in the room.
There were only three occasions when they spoke during that time. The first was when Melchior asked Peaches to pass him the salt. She simply ignored him. Perhaps she wanted him to cut down, since salt can be bad for your blood pressure. However, Melchior’s reaction – a grimace of irritation and a theatrical reaching for the salt cellar across the table – suggested to me that he knew Peaches did not have his health primarily at heart in ignoring his request.
The second time they spoke came shortly after an unfortunate incident that almost broke my cover. I’d made myself Heinz baked beans for supper that night – like I say, it was Melchior’s night to cook – and I was experiencing problems with my digestion. At about 9.33 p.m. I broke wind. The emanation was perfectly soundless, but there was no mistaking the pungency of the odour that was slowly infusing the room, like one of the vaporous mists that filled the streets in the autumn.
After nearly a minute had passed, Peaches asked Melchior if he had “cut the cheese”. This was an American expression my mother used. Melchior denied it. Peaches became heated, saying, “You can’t even tell the truth about something as simple as that.” Melchior continued to insist that he was innocent. Then they fell back into an angry silence again.
Shortly after that, Peaches asked Melchior what time it was and Melchior informed her that there was a clock in the kitchen if she wanted to know, and that appeared to be the end of the conversation for the night.
Once Melchior and Peaches had finished their food, they didn’t even bother to clear up the plates, like they always told me I had to. They just left them there and slouched back on the sofa, one at each end with a gap of a metre between the two of them.
I was getting tired by then. The television had been turned off and concentrating on keeping still and quiet was becoming very tedious. I felt myself yawning repeatedly and had decided to give up and go to bed. But just as I was about to leave, my parents produced a little scrap of a conversation that was quite instructive.
Melchior got up as if to leave the room, but then he turned and said, “I know it’s difficult, Marie-France. But it would be good to at least try to talk, don’t you think?”
Peaches didn’t say anything at first. Then after several more seconds had passed, she said, “We’ll only fight.”
“That’s up to us, isn’t it?” said Melchior.
“What do you want to talk about?” Peaches asked.
“Everything, I suppose,” he replied.
“I’m very tired,” said Peaches.
“You’re always tired when we need to talk,” said Melchior.
Peaches sat up straight with a not-very-nice gleam in her eye, and said, “Well go ahead then, Mel. What’s eating you? Spit it out. Spill the beans. Solve the equation.”
Melchior sighed in just that same deep, bone-tired way he’d sighed when he had talked to me in the bedroom.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Peaches, who only a few seconds previously had been supposedly too tired to talk, said, “Come on then, let’s hear it.”
Melchior said, “What are we going to do about Strato?”
My stomach lurched.
“What do you mean, ‘What are we going to do about Strato?’” Peaches said.
“If the worst comes to the worst. He’s obviously upset and worried. Yesterday he hid and you couldn’t find him.”
“He just went out to post a letter.”
“That means he left the house without telling anyone, which is out of character. And then there’s the truanting. He never truanted from the school in London.”
“What are you saying? That you want to move back to London?”
“No, I’m not saying that.”
Then Peaches’ angry expression slipped for a moment, and she looked moment
arily sad. “Will the worst come to the worst? Perhaps we’re both just having a difficult time adjusting.”
“Adjusting to what?”
“Don’t be obtuse, dahlin’. To moving down here. To you changing your job. To living with our past.”
“Everyone has a past to live with.”
“Not everyone has a past like ours.”
“What’s different about ours?”
“It’s different because it was so recently the present.”
By then I had lost the thread of the conversation entirely.
Then Melchior said, “We do need to consider the worst case scenario.”
Then Peaches looked angry again and said, “You should have considered that before there was a worst-case scenario.”
Melchior fiddled with the nose clamps on his glasses, a habit he has when he’s feeling at a loss.
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow. I’m too tired to jump over all the hurdles you’re putting up right now. But promise me that we will talk about it. Because we can’t keep pretending that—’’
He didn’t finish his sentence, because Peaches interrupted him.
“Stop being so melodramatic, Melchior,” she said.
Melchior ignored this. “I need you to promise, Marie-France.”
Peaches yawned. “What you need is a kick in your fat, lecherous ass.”
Melchior just stared at her. Eventually she gave just the hint of a nod.
“Fine. OK. Good. Whatever you say.”
“When?” said Melchior.
“Everything’s got to be logged and catalogued with you, hasn’t it? Nice and precise with clean edges. Shall we say 7.03? Or 7.08? Or 8.12? Is that good for you? 8.12?”
“Just tell me roughly when.”
Peaches yawned and stretched.
“You’re always nagging me. You want everything nailed down. Life isn’t like that. There’s nothing to nail it to. It happens in its own way.”
“Please, Peaches. Make a commitment. For Strato’s sake.”