Subjects, page 3
‘Perfect. I’ll be poised amongst the caviar canapes.’
‘Night, Dad. Hope you get a standing ovation at the least.’
‘You won’t be able to hear me for the rapturous applause. Sleep tight, pumpkin. Speak to you tomorrow.’
‘Night, Dad. Love you.’
‘Love you too. Don’t work too late.’
She wouldn’t. She needed to catch up after today, but she’d make sure she was in bed by midnight at the least.
*
They couldn’t help but experiment with the cocktail straws. The cross-sectional area, they’d hypothesised, was irrelevant. As long as p was greater than hρg, once you’d sucked up as much as you could, the water would stay inside when you held your thumb on top. Regardless. Theoretically.
Hugo laughed as he shook the drips of orange Manhattan from his trousers, and wrung out his sock goodnaturedly as Mark potted ice cubes into his empty shoe from the top of the table leg using the other straw. Neither of them would have remembered to finish the drinks in any case. Just gulped them down at closing time, wondering vaguely where the time had gone, why they’d ordered something so exotic in the first place and whether the bar would do a simple beer to chase them down.
‘So – world’s longest straw? Next year’s project maybe? What’s this year’s, by the way?’
It’d been decades since they’d collaborated. But they still liked to set themselves an annual challenge.
‘Working Roman catapult, with Jack, in the back garden.’
‘Fantastic. Brilliant fun.’
‘Yours?’
Hugo hadn’t decided yet. He hadn’t thought of doing it with the children, he had to admit. It wasn’t as if they were ever together with whole afternoons to spare.
‘And last year we did this animated e-book for his school. His text, my cartoons. Kids loved it. Sold a hundred online copies as a fundraiser. Mind you, little so-and-so only had to write seventy words. I spent blinking hours on it, and my name’s in smaller print.’
Perhaps he, Hugo, should create something with more of a legacy too. The mini compost-powered motor of 2010 had burned out years ago, and the light sensor that played the Red Dwarf theme when you opened up the fridge had whined its way to a tinny halt when the youngest – how come he could reach so high so soon? – had stretched for the shining silver blobs of solder and pulled the blue-green wire loops out.
He was conscious of his absence. This year he’d do something he hadn’t tried before. Something fatherly. Something they could keep.
The annual challenge.
Once the conference was over, he’d have a think.
Four
Tuesday, 5 January 2016
‘Porridge or a cooked breakfast?’ Sofia said brightly, standing there in Hugo’s apron, wiping down the sink. Tim and Isaac came to a surprised halt as they tumbled through the doorway.
‘Isn’t it school today?’ said Isaac, hoping he might have made a mistake about the start of term somewhere.
‘It certainly is,’ said Sofia. ‘Cheese and onion or ready salted in your packed lunch?’
‘I’ve done them,’ said Florence, ‘they’re in the fridge.’
‘Oh, thank you, darling. That’s really, really kind. So, who’s for porridge and who would like a lovely soft-boiled egg?’
There was an awkward pause.
‘Am I allowed porridge with honey?’ said Isaac, looking at his sister.
Florence shrugged and went out to the dining room to get an extra chair.
‘Of course you can, my darling,’ said Sofia. ‘I’ve done enough for everyone just in case. Just a couple of minutes and it’ll be on the boil. Do you want soldiers too, and a dippy egg?’
‘Mum, you know we leave at ten-past eight,’ said Tim, as if addressing an elderly relative who wasn’t quite all there.
‘I’ll drive you,’ she said grandly. ‘You can have a lift today.’
Isaac sat down happily with the honey dipper, twizzling it over the table to the edges of his bowl.
Florence and Tim looked at each other.
‘I do need to be there by eight-fifty at the latest,’ said Florence, wondering if today her mother would be showering before she dressed.
‘Don’t worry – we’ll take Dad’s car. I’m picking up the other one from Pete just after nine.’
‘Is it fixed already?’ asked Isaac.
‘It was just the bumper. He’s done a temporary repair.’
‘What’s tempry?’
‘For the moment. To keep us going. Just for now.’
Sofia swirled around the table in her bathrobe, putting down steaming bowls and plates, and piles of chargrilled toast, then swung out of the room and disappeared up the stairs.
‘Crazy,’ mouthed Tim to his siblings, rolling his eyes and spiralling a pointed finger round and round his ear.
‘I like it,’ said Isaac, sucking patches of crumby honey from his thumb. ‘When’s Daddy back?’
‘Monday,’ said Florence, making a swift calculation in her head. With luck, it should have started to wear off by then.
*
Sofia left the car right by the station once she had dropped the children off. Hugo could collect it on his way back home. Then she trotted through the dark morning light to the Citroen, parked up carefully on the verge outside Pete’s MOTs.
All seems OK, said the note in the passenger seat. New bumper in next week. Est £448 parts and labour, excl VAT. Go steady. P.
The clutch gave a tiny distant squeal as she turned the spare key and rolled out into the road, but the car had no other memories of yesterday. Sofia’s were burning bright. She focused firmly on yesterday’s revelation, already ameliorating the horror of impact. The library was the place, the obvious starting point for general enlightenment. She took a bumpy shortcut down the side streets to be there at opening time.
It wasn’t yet 8.30am, and she watched jealously through the windscreen as two assistants, chattering up the path, let themselves in and closed the door behind. In the background, lit by yellow bulbs still blinking themselves awake, the head librarian extracted little bundles from a box of polystyrene.
Sofia stretched her aching neck to see what else she could pick out. The collection was parochial, mid-sized, the far wall already visible, marking out its limits – unlike the university library, with shelves and aisles and shelves and aisles extending beyond sight: a hall of mirrors housing racks of infinite wisdom. Here would be the large print books, swathed in once-clear plastic coverings, now greasy to the touch, their stickers shifted sideways in their grimy frames of glue. And local works, overrepresented in the global scale of things, sitting comfortably with exhibitions of very average paintings, their value only heightened by a native subject theme. Then the children’s section, inhabited with dangerous jungle creatures in giant cushion form; faux leather poofs that wobbled, then pushed you to the floor, and a fetid carpet with brightly coloured shapes detracting from the drool and snot and urine rubbed into the pile.
Fiction seemed to take up all of the left-hand side, judging by the size and arrangement of the volumes, squeezed like giant caterpillars between each shelf partition. Between the pages were no doubt famous tales of Irish passion, village scandal, family betrayal, bodies in the grass – and when these had all been borrowed, less well-known leftovers, fallen on their sides into the gaps. The area to the right, the part she couldn’t see, would be devoted to hobby guides: how to crochet, turn ashwood, garden from a window box or make a gourmet dinner from fresh truffles and tinned peas. If she were lucky, there would be an encyclopaedia or two, or a PC she could borrow to search a proper catalogue, and a single stripe of shelving for each major specialty.
It was a start, though, a good start, and in a way the perfect place to scope the confines of her knowledge, the world of information in microcosmic form. From here, she could identify the building blocks of understanding. It might be easier, indeed, to work on a smaller scale, for everything must emanate from the same roots and categ…
Sofia jumped, inhaling a sharp sniff of freezing air. They were unbolting the front entrance. She hoisted herself out of the car, slammed the door and ran in, pointing the key behind her but not caring if it locked. She smiled winningly at both attendants and bobbed her head to the librarian, then walked at the fastest speed that wouldn’t attract undue attention, round towards non-fiction on the right.
No knitting books. No upholstery guides or fishing lakes of Britain. Just more caterpillars, arching up and down within their wooden stalls. It couldn’t all be fiction, could it? Just literature? No truth? She started to feel anxious, the air inside her body trapped, concertina-like, seething back and forth. She kept on walking, past grey Formica desks and a display of magazines, W for Wells and Wilde and Williams, X for Xinran, Y for Yeats. She envied them, the authors, immortalised already, their place assured forever between A and B and Z. She was just passing Z for Zola (shouldn’t she know who Zola was?) when she realised the whole of the top floor was in fact a giant backwards L, and she had only reached as far as the end of the shortest leg. She turned left around the final shelving unit and exhaled with relief. A whole gallery lay ahead, three times the size and infinitely lighter and more spacious, a modern add-on built to house the factual and the real. Not university proportions, but with a far wall that was comfortably distant, beyond more subject rows than could be counted at a glance.
This was it. This was what she had been looking for. The key to erudition.
Without thinking, she set off for Psychology. How many times had she made a beeline for that subject, to fill her brain with Piaget, Pavlov, phobias and play? She never knew exactly how she got there. The section always showed itself somehow, through a guiding image – the cutaway skull filled with brightly coloured cogs or neon spaghetti, or other representations of the mind contained therein – signalling from the spine of a textbook or the cover of a journal, beckoning her on from…
‘Excuse me.’
She started guiltily. Perhaps she wasn’t supposed to be in this section. She was after all, as yet, unregistered, unlicensed to partake of this particular collection, except as a bystander, a voyeur journeying through. She started to babble an excuse, before she had even turned around fully to identify the speaker. ‘I was just on my way to renew my—’
‘Excuse me, madam.’ The voice spoke over her with careful urgency.
A short figure, packed with the muscle of manual labour, hovered a chivalrous yard away, pulling the two halves of his battered leather jacket together with raw, dark-skinned hands. His eyes flashed white with anxious optimism in a wide and genial face, underneath thick brows and a tightly tended head of springy carob-coloured hair.
Sofia’s brain ran wildly through the societal possibilities. Was he a member of the cleaning staff, at the end of a dawn shift, moving her on so he could polish up the final shelves? Or a taxi driver, dropped in to check the papers and make use of the loo, stopping her for directions to the next place? A mature international student, maybe, making an early start and putting his youthful, sleeping UK compatriots to shame? Who else would frequent a medium-sized public library before breakfast time was over? But the clothes, physique and careful diction didn’t fit somehow.
‘I looking… I’m looking for English Language Section, please. If you can help me, please?’ The gentleman clasped his hands and rocked forward upon his shabby polished loafers.
Sofia was none the wiser. She stared at him, open-mouthed. Even in the ticking glare of the fluorescent light above, designed to sap the vibrancy from everything around, she was struck by the translucent luminescence of his foreign outdoor skin.
‘I just need number, please. Dewey number.’ He pronounced it “Dee Way”.
Sofia glanced around for clues. It should be a simple enough question for a native English speaker. ‘Oh, sure, no problem,’ she said, her eyes whirling from shelf end to shelf end. ‘English language… that’ll be… that’ll be with… with… languages, I guess.’ She tried to focus on the nearest set of books, but the numbers on the spines formed an unfathomable code. 302 JAK. 303 BAR. 373.3-373.9. 338.476772109. What did the letters mean? Who was JAK? Why was there a hyphen in the code? And who could possibly need nine decimal places in everyday life?
‘I think it’s… I… I think it might be…’
But they both knew she was bluffing.
‘It’s no problem, madam. I keep looking. No problem. Sorry I disturb you.’
He raised a hand in a gracious half-wave and turned into the aisle beside them, where he began systematically stepping up to examine the shelf above his head, then down, to view the one on his eyeline, and the two below, then moving across to complete the exercise again.
Sofia couldn’t help it. Three juddering sniffs, each building on the one before, pulled themselves up from her ribcage and escaped in a single, tormented yelp. Then she couldn’t stop. Little inhalations, one after the other, hitched up in her trachea, until it could hold no more and released them in a series of miserable brays. She cupped both hands and turned her face bookwards, to shade her crumpled face, as tears dripped onto the carpet tiles.
The stranger dropped down onto his heels and clasped his hands together awkwardly. Then he took three kindly steps towards her, stopping a polite two metres away.
‘Is everything OK, madam?’
Sofia nodded, smiling wetly with her hand over her mouth. ‘I’m fine.’ She gulped. ‘Thank you. Sorry. Everything’s OK. Honestly. I’m not used to… it’s a long time since—’
‘Can I help you with something?’
‘No, no, really, I’m fine. Just being a bit stupid. Thank you. I’m so sorry I couldn’t assist. I expect the lady at the desk can show you where to find what you need.’
He looked at her for a moment, half puzzled, half knowing, then dipped his head to mark the end of their engagement, raised his hand in thanks and walked backwards down the aisle and out of sight.
Sofia took a hold of herself. On a quest to ascertain the depths of her existing ignorance, she didn’t even have the map or understand the grid references upon which it was based. For years, she’d wandered competently in the labyrinth of her specialty, never needing to find her way out, or locate it from outside – getting there, if she ever did find herself searching for it in a bibliographic setting, by feel and hunch and instinct and bright symbolic clues. She was a local who had today failed to guide an overseas tourist to the most obvious of landmarks. She needed to start at the beginning. The very beginning. Had to find the key. She sniffed up her tears, wiped a trail of watery mucus across her cheek using her sleeve and dried the end of her nose upon her cuff.
After a few abortive lunges into various aisles, she found what she was looking for: a smartly bound reference book on one of the endcaps, with a laminated A4 sheet above entitled “Dewey Decimal Classification and Relative Index: Introduction and Tables: 1”. She wiped her hands and opened it with a heavy thump, watching the arched pages slapping back into position. The central leaves were incomprehensibly mathematical, with mystical references to “subdivision”, “built numbers” and something called “rule of zero”. She heaved them over to get right back to the start, and there it was: the legend, the cipher – simple in the end. She gazed at the solution.
000 Computer Science, Information and General Works
100 Philosophy and Psychology
200 Religion
300 Social Sciences
400 Language
500 Science
600 Technology
700 Arts and Recreation
800 Literature
900 History and Geography
Ten neat boxes. One framework to start with at the least. She flicked over the page until she came to a table. Generalities. That was what she lacked. Specifics didn’t serve her now. They didn’t help with Christmas quizzes, or homework, or Big Questions posed at random in the car. She would start there. And she would start with the most specific of general things. Knowledge. The stuff itself. 001.
*
Sofia wound her way back to the first of the aisles. She didn’t know exactly what she was expecting. Titles which beckoned all-encompassingly, she supposed, like those in Hugo’s prized collection. Life, The Universe and Everything, The Meaning of Liff (he’d had to explain the joke), or those condensed but sweeping chronological classics she’d never got round to reading: A Short History of the World, A Short History of Nearly Everything, A Brief History of Time. But the shelves were disappointingly dominated by computer programming guides, data processing manuals and books with the word “systems” in. Where were the travel guides? The road maps? The indices of human wisdom?
She changed tack and decided to search by keyword on a PC she found waiting in the wings. “General knowledge” yielded a more promising selection: A–Z of Everything; The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search for Knowledge; The Knowledge Illusion; An Underground Education; Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction, plus several of the classics she’d been searching for above. It seemed she would have to track down 001 like 007, picking off individual volumes from here and there, venturing down hidden alleyways and darting from rack to rack. She jotted down the catalogue references and set off on her mission.
She had painstakingly garnered nine books from their disparate locations when she became conscious of a rushing wheeling sound accompanied by little cries and stuttering feet, passing in a miniature Doppler effect. Buggies followed like giant bats, their folded wings of black collapsed into skeletal metal frames, pushed by weary mothers bent on a change of habitat. The children’s section had been located, with infinite wisdom, as far as possible from public view, right down the long arm of the L shape, near the toilets and 900.
