Gut Symmetries

  He died in the oval of his tears.

  My mother insisted that the funeral tea be served at the Hotel Ra-Ra (décor Merseyside-Egypt). The hotel, that had catered for the shipping trade in its handsomer days now wrung a living out of salesman incentive weekends and marketing days for the frozen-fish industry. It had a sorrow about it unrelieved by the magnificent marble steps and Lalique lamps. Its kitsch Anubis lay exhausted in the foyer and its replica of Cleopatra’s Needle had been patched with aluminium foil. Our tea had been laid out in the Pharaoh Room. Drinks were in the Pyramid Bar.

  ‘Once there was nowhere like it,’ said my mother.

  Once? She had stayed in enough hotels to realise that there could never be anywhere like it. Benefiting from its frozen-fish connections, the hotel was offering mummified prawns, ice still clinging to their carcasses as though they were waiting to be rejuvenated in the next century. After the prawns came the sandwiches. Funeral Sandwiches on specially ordered black rye bread. I read the list. Egg. Egg and tomato. Egg and cress. Egg Mersey. When I asked the waitress about Egg Mersey she told me with Nefertiti hauteur that it was egg without the yolk.

  ‘Hard-boiled-egg-white sandwiches?’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  As I progressed up the meal table I found the disappeared yolks. Each yolk had been cut in halves and stood, dome up, on a platter. This was called Egg Peaks.

  ‘What a lot of egg,’ I said to no one in particular.

  ‘There was a mix-up,’ said Nefertiti. ‘I was told you were Merry Hen.’

  ‘Merry Hen?’

  ‘ “Britain’s Brightest Egg”. It’s their conference tomorrow.’

  ‘And today is my father’s funeral.’

  I left her, nonplussed, defensive, and went over to my grandmother who was sitting alone beneath a browned palm tree. She had a plate of Funeral Sandwiches and a glass of sherry.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  No. It doesn’t matter. The funeral is for the living not the dead. It would have amused my father to see the grey and guilty men flocking round my mother in the Pyramid Bar.

  ‘There’s worse to come,’ she said.

  She meant the Will. She had told me what my father had done. My sisters, who had married richly, expected to be richer still. As Jane Austen heroines everywhere, they were perfumed with love but smelled money. Tomorrow we would have to go to London for the reading of the Will.

  ‘Let’s go home.’

  We reversed through the fire-door behind Grandmother’s chair. Outside, the streets were busy with shoppers, and it was neither the blaring plate-glass nor the deadly absurdities of the Hotel Ra-Ra that made me feel giddy but the space in between them. The engulfing space between flat earth and tilted earth. The space where I could fall and float between their lives and mine.

  Death the Revealer. When he throws back his hood what is it that he uncovers? His face or ours? Our faces usually hid from one another behind assumption and complacency. Our faces turned away even when our bodies are turned near. Do I want to look at you, afraid of what I might see? I prefer to look through you, round you, with you, anything to avoid the intensity of one single face. And will you look at me, hood thrown back, vulnerable? They did, curiously, unnerved, and looked away quickly. There was something wrong with that woman. They saw me raw. They drew their own hoods tighter. Death the Revealer in my liquid stare.

  Walk with me. Hand in hand through the nightmare of narrative. Need to tell a story when no story can be told. Walk the level reassuring floor towards the open trapdoor. Plank by plank to where the sea begins. This is a sea story, a wave story, a story that breaks and ebbs, spilling the boat up on the beach, dragging it out to a tiny dot. Life asail on its own tears.

  Walk the plank. The rough, springy underfoot of my emotions. The ‘I’ that I am, subjective, hesitant, goaded from behind, afraid of what lies ahead, the drop, the space, the gap between other people and myself.

  Hear me. Speak to me. Look at me.

  ‘Look at me,’ said Grandmother. Yes look at her. Spiny as a jujube tree, sweet as a julep, ju-jitsu-minded with a heart like a jubilee. Energy, work and heat in the joule-force of her. A wryneck jynx, sudden turn of the head. Woodpecker bird at the World Ash Tree.

  We were walking home. Everybody else playing Saturday donkey, pannier laden either side with vegetables and meat. The queues at the bus-stop, the shop-neon switching off, the roar of the garbage trucks clearing forests of cardboard. All this familiar and far away. I wanted to buy something the way I want to flex my fingers when they are chilled. Still there? All still there? Normal, and I a part of it. If all these lives are as before why not mine?

  I stopped and got a couple of Mars Bars from a paper-stand.

  ‘Old lady hungry is she?’ said the vendor. I thought he meant the chocolate and I glanced at Grandmother walking like a question mark beside me. I was holding her hand and in the other she was holding the plate of Funeral Sandwiches from the Hotel Ra-Ra. Gently, I put them on the pavement and we walked on.

  My father used to do magic tricks. His favourite was to flounce a red silk handkerchief over a tumbler of water and toss it at one of his friends. As they stepped back in dismay, expecting to be doused, the handkerchief fluttered harmlessly at their feet, no trace of the airborne H2O.

  How was it done? My father never performed this trick unless he was standing behind a desk or table where he had prudently pinned a servante. A servante, out of sight, and in line with the magician’s testicles, is a deep pocket designed to contain the debris of the last trick and the essentials of the one to follow. While my father made great play of arranging his handkerchief over the glass, he dropped the glass into the servante. The shape of the already vanished tumbler was maintained by a metal ring, like a large cock ring, sewn into the double thickness of the handkerchief. To the observer, the ring is the rim of the glass, and so, when the handkerchief is pirouetted into the air, the glass seems to have disappeared.

  He terrorised my mother by insisting on whipping the tablecloth off the table when it had been set for dinner. As children we adored such Mephistophelean disregard for order, the scandalised cups and plates flung against gravity into a Madhatter’s party. Sometimes my father said it was the table that had been spirited away, and that the saucers, knives, forks and jugs re-settled in their proper place, had only the tablecloth on which to depend.

  Perhaps he was right. Perhaps there is no table. Perhaps the firm surface of order and stability is as much an illusion as a silk handkerchief over a non-existent glass. Glass and table have long since disappeared but the shape remains convincing. At least until we learn how it is done.

  If the Superstring theory is correct there is no table. There is no basic building block, no firm stable first principle on which to pile the rest. The cups and saucers are in the air, the cloth levitating under them, the table itself is notional, we would feel uncomfortable eating our dinner without it, in fact it is a vibration as unsolid as ourselves.

  Where is my father? Meaningless question, he would say, but it has meaning for me, who has buried what I thought of as him, his solid self. The firm surface of my father on which we piled the rest. The statue of Atlas holding up the world, but what holds up Atlas, as the old conundrum goes?

  My father was his own conjuring trick; the impression of something solid when what was solid had vanished away. He had become his clothes. He had become his job. It was as though he had tunnelled into another life without telling anyone, including himself. I imagine him, vigorous, unconcerned, in a wilder place, cheating us here with a lacquered offering of respectability, his painted funeral mask wheeled through the streets while he had reassembled himself on the other side of the wall. Stuff of science fiction? If there are parallel universes my authentic father could have been living on any one of them, leaving us with his distorted self.

  Infinite grace. Infinite possibility. The mercy of the universe extended in its own law
s. According to quantum theory there are not only second chances, but multiple chances. Space is not simply connected. History is not unalterable. The universe itself is forked. If we knew how to manipulate space-time as space-time manipulates itself the illusion of our single linear lives would collapse. And if our lives here are not the total our death here will not be final.

  I play with these things to free myself from common sense, which tells me, not least, that I experience the earth as flat and my father as dead. He may be less dead now than he has been for thirty years. My grandmother’s old-fashioned religious comfort of an afterlife may not be as soft-headed as some believe. As an armchair atheist I stumble into God as soon as I get up and walk. I do not know what God is, but I use it as a notation of value.

  God = highest value. Force and freedom of the thinking universe. The model of the universe as mechanical has no basis in fact. In a quantum universe, heaven and hell are simply parallel possibilities. In our Judeo-Christian myth-world, Eve ate the apple. In a symmetrical myth-world next door, Eve did not. Paradise lost. Paradise unlost. Objections to this are logical but quantum mechanics is not interested in our logic. Every quantum experiment conducted has shown, again and again, with dismaying mischief, that particles can hold positions contradictory and simultaneous.

  ‘If we ask whether the position of the electron remains the same we must say no. If we ask whether the electron’s position changes with time, we must say no. If we ask whether the electron is at rest we must say no. If we ask whether it is in motion we must say no.’ (Robert Oppenheimer)

  Where is my father? The decay of him is buried. Impossible that he should be alive and dead at the same time. Quantum theory states that for every object there is a wave function that measures the probability of finding that object at a certain point in space and time. Until the measurement is made, the object (particle) exists as a sum of all possible states. The difficulty here, between the logical common sense world and the complex, maverick universe, is that at a sub-atomic level, matter does not exist, with certainty, in definite places, rather it has a tendency to exist. At the sub-atomic level, our seeming-solid material world dissolves into wave-like patterns of probabilities, and these patterns do not represent probabilities of things but probabilities of connection. Atlas 0 Ariadne 1. The hard-hat bull-nose building blocks of matter, manipulated by classical physics, now have to be returned as an infinite web of relationships. What is chosen and why is still unknown.

  A wave function spreads indefinitely, though at its farthest it is infinitesimally flimsy. Theoretically, it was always possible, though unlikely, to find my father beyond the solar system, his clustered energies elsewhere. More obviously, my father seemed to be here, as you and I are here, but we too can be measured as wave functions, unlimited by the boundaries of our bodies. What physicists identify as our wave function may be what has traditionally been called the soul. My father, at the moment of physical death, may simply have shifted to an alternative point of his wave function. What my grandmother believes in and I speculate upon, seems only to be a difference in terminology. She hopes he is in heaven. I hope he has found the energy to continue along his own possibility.

  Sceptical? The laws of physics concern themselves with what is possible not what is practical.

  The property of matter and light is very strange. How can we accept that everything can be, at the same time, an entity confined in volume (a particle) and a wave spread out over huge regions of space? This is one of the paradoxes of quantum theory, or as the Hindu mystics put it centuries ago, ‘smaller than small, bigger than big’. We are and we are not our bodies.

  If we accept Hawking’s idea that we should treat the entire universe as a wave function, both specifically located and infinite, then that function is the sum of all possible universes, dead, alive, multiple, simultaneous, interdependent, co-existing. Moreover, ‘we’ and the sum universe cannot be separated in the way of the old Cartesian dialectic of ‘I’ and ‘World’. Observer and observed are part of the same process. What did Paracelsus say? ‘The galaxa goes through the belly.’ What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millennia, the expanding universe opening in your gut. No longer confined by volume, my father is free to choose the extent of himself. Is that him, among the stars and starfish of different skies?

  This is how I explain it. My mother drinks. My grandmother reads the Bible, my sisters numb themselves in excess family life. To each his own epidural. It does ease the pain but the pain persists, the dull ache, low down as though my back had been broken and not properly healed. Perhaps it would be better to lie on his grave like a dog. To howl out the plain fact that there is no comfort, no relief, that grief must be endured until it has exhausted itself on me. My mind repeats its exercises like a lesson-book. Over and over the same ground, memories, happiness, the said and unsaid, the last hours, helplessness of the living, autonomy of the dead.

  ‘He is not dead,’ I say to myself, renouncing the word because it is imprecise.

  ‘David is dead,’ says my grandmother, over and over, with the finality of a bell.

  We looked at each other, afraid to speak, afraid to load our feelings into words in case the words cracked and split. I pinned my tongue to the roof of my mouth. Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached. I need now to be finite, self-contained, to stop this bacterial grief dividing and multiplying till its weight is the weight of the world. Bacteria: agents of putrefaction. My father’s decay lodged in me. Fed on, what is vital is sapped. I decrease. It increases. Bowel to brain of me, this pain. What words? What words can I trust to convey this fragile heart?

  Stopper it up, heart and words, give the pain nothing to feed on. Still now, my still heart. I will counterfeit death as my father counterfeited life. On that continuum we meet.

  Grandmother and I sat face to face over the sepulchral plastic of the breakfast bar. Common and rare, to sit face to face like this. Common that people do, rare that they understand each other. Each speaks a private language and assumes it to be the lingua franca. Sometimes words dock and there is a cheer at port and cargo to unload and such relief that the voyage was worth it. ‘You understand me then?’

  I wanted her to understand me. I wanted to find a word, even one, that would have the same meaning for each of us. A word not bound and sealed in dictionaries of our own. ‘Though I speak with tongues of men and angels but have not love …’

  ‘I love you.’

  She nodded. ‘Can we get rid of all this, do you think?’

  She meant the kitchen. The breakfast bar was easy to demolish and I unscrewed all those handy flat-packed chipboard and formica cupboards and put them in a pile in the yard. I went out and bought some coal and we lit the range again, filthy, black, smoky, unhygienic, red eye laughing at us. We carried in the scrubbed-elm table and the big dresser. Underneath the acrylic floor covering were the polished stone tiles.

  ‘They’ll put you in a home,’ I said.

  ‘This is my home and it was David’s and it will be yours when I die.’

  When I die. The words running forward into the future. For now, her home, her way of life. Too much had been taken away already.

  ‘This is how I want it,’ she said. ‘So that I can remember.’ She heaved herself under the sink and brought out the formaldehyde rabbit. ‘It was David who bottled this.’ We put it back on the dresser shelf, its ears bobbing against its lid.

  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

  The Moon

  MISSING PRESUMED DEAD

  A yacht sailing off Capri was last sighted on Sunday June 16 at 18:00 hours. The boat was in difficulties. Severe storms prevented rescue attempts for 24 hours. It is thought that the boat could be drifting at sea.

  Am I dead? Dead as in doornail. Dead as in to the world. Dead as in gone. Dead as in buried. Dead as a dodo, dead as a herring, dead as mutton, dead as in left for?

  We he
ard the bulletin when our short-wave radio spat into life. Through the crackle and the static came news of our death. Jove, with his head-cans and his screwdriver has been trying to tap back a message but the frequency is jammed. We can listen in but we can’t call out. I heard some Mozart this morning, ‘Madamina, il catalogo e questo/Delle belle che amo il padron mio.’ (Dear lady, this is a list of the beauties my master has loved.)

  Dead as in dead in his arms? Before we left I had a note from Alice saying she would be joining us at the port in a few days. When she did not arrive, Jove levered me into signing for the boat. ‘Nothing to it,’ he said. ‘Just a rudder and an engine.’

  At first it was plain sailing. Bobbing boat. Blue lagoon. Fishing, coffee, safe outline of the coast and other vessels hailing us. When the sea took the colour of clotted blood from the setting sun bleeding into it, we noticed the shallower swimming fish fast-finning it below the waves. We did not understand that they were using the deep water as a shelter. The sea had become lake-like, flat enough to walk on, a miracle sea and we two pilgrims in our little boat.

  ‘A voyage of self-discovery,’ said Jove. What I discovered, as the boat reared up like a rocket and gravity abandoned us, was that Jove had written the note from Alice. He clung to the cabin stove, screwed in to the deck and begged me to forgive him. He had remembered he was a Catholic and he was afraid to face death with a deception round his neck.

  ‘You bastard,’ I shouted, my body covered with crockery. ‘You stupid selfish bastard.’ And I found out that Alice had gone because her father was dying. My heart tore.

  Is this how it ends? When Papa died, Mama was having an affair with a man she worked for and I was supposed not to know. Papa was supposed not to know. Mama did not believe in life after death, she wanted her life before death. She hated the enclosed space she trod like a tethered animal. Her anger. Papa’s sorrow. His death when his heart wore too thin for his body.