‘Do I feel her assaults? Indeed I do.’
Dan directs his steps towards the town centre: he recalls building sites that seem the most promising wire-troves. Reading is an obstacle-course town of underpasses, multi-storey car-parks and complex pedestrian crossings. The River Kennet somehow burrows its way through the concrete jungle to join the larger Thames, which glides dismissively round the leafier north side of the town.
There are youths on the Kennet’s towpath, up to no good. Youths — at the age of thirty-two, Dan already finds the word on his lips. He stops for a moment on the footbridge. A girl who ought to be cold is trying to hula the life-ring, and shrieks when it lands on her foot with a thud. A boy laughs.
‘Piece of shit,’ she declares, and heaves the ring not very impressively into the river. Splosh. A couple of half-hearted cheers. Then the group wanders on down the towpath walkway.
Ripples glint as the life-ring begins to drift downstream, accelerating silently. Two thoughts branch in Dan’s mind. The first is how the season of peak flow depends on the geography of the region: while alpine rivers are super-charged by snowmelt in the early summer and tropical waters are swelled by the rainy season, here, in a temperate lowland with year-round rainfall, evaporation rates run the show and winter is the river’s busy shift.
This thought snaps out automatically along synapses long trained to test observations against stores of knowledge. The second thought is more leisurely, and seems to reach away in the direction of the retreating teenagers: while these kids probably do suffer from a failure to imagine that something bad might happen to them, or to someone they love, the girl may have rightly estimated that the probability of any single life-ring ever being used to save a life is almost zero. He’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.
He continues apprehensively into the boozy heart of the town. A glimpsed crane leads him down an unfamiliar street, and he is soon lost. Reading has a special gift for disorientation. After four years his mental map is still a bubble-chart of familiar fragments with no unifying structure. He does know the ring road — a crumpled triangle with each side a little under a mile — and so his last resort is always to proceed in a straight line until he hits this noisy and well-charted feature. Tonight he is in no hurry, so he allows himself to wander.
In a grimy side-street, more youths and plenty of not-so-youths stand outside a bar, and will have to be passed. Dan checks his dressing gown belt and tries to project a force-field of unremarkability. He receives stares and sniggers but no comments until his back is turned. Then a voice booms.
‘’ospital’s the other way, mate!’
Guffaws. But this direction is helpful. If the hospital — and Natalie — are behind him, he is on course for the building sites near the station.
‘Freak,’ is the funny-man’s final judgement. We are all freaks: we are all highly improbable. The crane looms nearer, and here is the last obstacle — the main shopping street, bustling with revellers. Dan strides out calmly. Involuntarily his mind sketches forces onto the crane’s silhouette, delighting in the knowledge that all the pushing, pulling, weighing and hanging adds up beautifully according to simple geometric tricks.
As he steps briskly up onto the pavement, he feels the toe of his slipper catch on the kerb. Time slows as the slipper drags sideways along the vertical face of the kerbstone, deflected by some slight overhang and his oblique course, unable to clear the obstacle while his bodyweight pivots forward irresistibly. In free fall, he acquires for a moment the grace of an asteroid, all Newtonian mass and no weight, rolling silently through space. Then the earth intervenes, in the form of paving slabs and a low wall that eludes the defences of his groping hands and finds its mark glancingly on his cheekbone. To trip and almost fall is a commonplace, but to go the whole hog, to crash and burn, a rare honour. Somebody cheers. The more sober bystanders hesitate, noting the bare legs and dressing gown, but once Dan has hoisted himself into a sitting position a young woman approaches boldly.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks. ‘There’s an ambulance parked round that corner, if you need some help.’
Dan looks at his angel, his Samaritan. Mid-twenties, a little overweight but healthy-looking, probably donates blood and volunteers for the Guides. Now she’s dressed for a night out but it doesn’t come naturally. He can feel a trickling on his cheek, touches, looks, yes — blood, plenty, a dull darkish smear in the yellow lamplight.
‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘I think perhaps I do.’
As a professional physicist who dabbles in chemistry and biology, Dan knows precisely why the lamplight is yellow and why the blood is red. But the presence of idle paramedics waiting to pick up drunks is genuine new information.
‘Shall I go with you?’ she offers. Her waiting friends, hot priests and Levites in short dresses, groan.
‘I’ll be fine. Thanks a lot, though. Have a good night.’ Isn’t that what you say to young people?
While the breezy but effective paramedic patches him up, a policewoman strolls over to find out whether he’s a threat to himself or others. Apparently he is, because she offers to drive him to Mark and Rachel’s place. Will somebody be at home, she keeps asking in the car. Yes, he repeats wearily, they’re as old as me, they’ll be home. And they are, with concerned faces quickly breaking into laughter, a slightly inferior glass of rosso and, best of all, a toothbrush in an unopened packet.
Lying on his friends’ sofa in the faint, pointless glow of standby lights on various screens and boxes, Dan Mock briefly, guiltily entertains the thought that he subconsciously ignored the clogged showerhead because he likes being pummelled.
Mike Vickers has set his screen to display the flight path, and is disappointed to see that it won’t, this time, commit the daring aeronautical transgression of cutting the nib of the giant Brie of Greenland. The glimpse across that desolation is pure geo-porn, inspiring a voluptuous shudder of horror at the vastness of the world. This time, sparsely twinkling Nova Scotia will have to suffice.
He likes the airlines’ habit of labelling unexpected cities on the sprawling continents: not Paris, Moscow, Rome, but instead Vigo, Zagreb, Khartoum. They want you to feel there’s more out there to explore — air tickets still worth buying. In Mike — a rare air-travel enthusiast — they’re preaching to the converted. Even Heathrow for all its faults is a place, fittingly, of big and beautiful skies. And then there are the aeroplane skies, surpassing all comprehension: a sea of shining feathers; a shagpile combed by the gods — all humanity mere unseen underlay; a field of white cow-pats as far as the eye can see; a slash of scarlet bisected by a black spillage of rain; a billowing tower ten miles high, to which jets are meaningless flecks of aluminium to be swallowed, tossed about, spat into space; horizons banked in impossible precipices of mauve and gold.
Yes, even business travel is an adventure. As the right wing dipped after this evening’s take-off, Mike ogled the M25 — those two competing funeral processions, the whites and the reds — and behind it the giant glowing organism of London. A god’s-eye view of this triumph of civilization to make the heart sing, of peaceful, productive coexistence, orderly yet free, unparalleled in the history of humankind.
He again picks up his magazine. Unrest. Inequality. A lost generation. Apparently. A few weeks ago, in a European airport (he forgets which), there was a handwritten notice beside the immigrant cleaners’ tips box: ‘your money or we sing’. He dried his hands and slipped in twenty euros. Has he done his bit?