‘Listen,’ he says, ‘we sort of got off on the wrong foot the other day.’
‘Did we?’
‘Well, I mean…’ He is dimly conscious of boys streaming by them on either side. ‘You know you told me you weren’t going to, ah, to do a certain thing with me?’
‘I told you I wasn’t going to sleep with you.’
‘Yes, that’s right…’ feeling himself flushing deeply. ‘Well, I just wanted… I hoped I hadn’t given the impression – I mean, I just wanted to tell you that I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t intending to, ah, do that with you either.’
She takes a moment to digest this, then says: ‘That’s all you could come up with, after two whole days?’
‘Yes,’ he says reluctantly.
‘Now I’m definitely not going to sleep with you,’ she says with a laugh, and turns on her heel.
‘Look,’ he puts in desperately, ‘when you say that – what is it that you mean?’
‘See you later, Howard,’ she calls over her shoulder.
‘Wait!’ But the enchantment is over: as he hurries after her, he is aware once more of existing in a world of objects, of obstacles, coming betw–
‘I do beg your pardon, Howard, I didn’t see you…’
Howard, winded, can only gasp.
‘Ah, Robert Graves!’ Jim Slattery lifts the book from the floor where it has fallen. ‘Are you reading this to the boys?’
Hopelessly, Howard stares after her receding form, which even seen from behind seems to mock him.
‘Remarkably versatile writer, Graves,’ Slattery continues obliviously. ‘One doesn’t come across his sort too often these days. Poetry, novels, classical mythology… I wonder, have you ever looked at his White Goddess? Barmy sort of a thing, but quite intriguing…’
Howard knows there is no escape now. For five years he sat in a classroom and listened to these rambles. Once Jim Slattery starts on a topic that interests him, only an act of God can divert him.
‘… delves into various pre-Christian societies – Europe, Africa, Asia – and keeps finding this same figure, this White Goddess, with long fair hair, blue eyes and a blood-red mouth. Right back to the Babylonians, it goes. His theory is that poetry as we know it grew out of this goddess-worship. All poetry, or rather all true poetry, tells the same story – a fertility myth, I suppose you’d call it…’
Blue eyes, a blood-red mouth.
‘… battle between the poet, who represents the coming spring, and as it were his supernatural double or negative self, who represents the past, winter, darkness, stasis, so forth, for the love of this White Goddess…’
Definitely not going to sleep with you.
‘Ended up in Mallorca, of all places – Graves, that is. Moved there with a woman, a poet. Deya. Went there ourselves, actually, a couple of years ago, my wife and I. Delightful place, once you get away from the resorts. Astonishing scenery. And the seafood! I remember my wife turning to me one night, she was having the shrimp…’
Howard nods vacantly. In the distance, he imagines he can see her white scarf whisk into the thicket of the Annexe, like the tip of a fox’s tail.
As soon as Skippy’s out of sight he starts to run. He keeps running until he finds himself in his room, his head full of flying sparks, almost too thick to see through.
Talk to you? What does he want to talk to you about?
Oh fuck!
Panic crackles down his nerves to spark painfully in his fingertips, thoughts crash into each other like bumper cars, and the worst thing about it is he doesn’t know why! He doesn’t know what’s pushing against the door of his brain, he doesn’t know why his heart’s beating so fast, he doesn’t know why it’s so important he doesn’t talk to Howard the Coward – and now he doesn’t know why he’s standing on a chair and hauling his bag from the wardrobe, tugging open drawers and flinging the contents over his shoulder onto the bed, underwear, socks, T-shirts, jumpers, runners –
And then something flickers past the window.
A moment later, he hears Edward ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson’s stereo come on full volume through the wall, though he knows Hutch is downstairs in the Ref. Beside the bed, Skippy’s radio alarm clock is flashing 00:00. He puts down his bag, and slowly turns to face the window. The room feels wobbly and floating off at the edges.
It went by almost too quickly to see; at the same time, somehow, he saw it. As he moves towards the window he hears a sudden clash of TVs, radios, computers babbling from the corridor, voices opening doors and asking each other what’s going on. He steps softly like it’s not him doing it, not daring to believe he saw what he thinks he saw; he pretends in fact this is not what he’s thinking, he pretends as he puts his eye to Ruprecht’s telescope that he is just having a casual look-around…
But all he sees are clouds and birds. Oh wow, what a surprise. Did he really expect that aliens were going to choose just this exact moment to arrive? Like they’ve come the whole way across space just to rescue – wait, there it is! Out of nowhere it appears in his viewer and is gone again. He scrambles around the sky, chasing after it, his heart pounding like it’s going to come right through his chest. Can this really be happening? Is he hallucinating? But no, now he gets a fix on it at last: a SAUCER-LIKE CRAFT, gliding through the air!
Ruprecht meanwhile is down in his laboratory, working on his Wave Oscillator. To a mind not quite so brilliant as his, the lab might come across as a little unheimlich. It is a cramped and windowless room deep in the bowels of the basement, lit by a single naked bulb; damp seeps up the walls, drips drip from the ceiling, and husks of previous inventions – the Clone-o-matic, the Weather Machine, the Invisibility Gun, the Protectron 3000 – loom from the shadows, each one aborted and cannibalized for other projects, so that now they resemble casualties from some awful mechanical war. For Ruprecht, though, the laboratory is a refuge, an oasis of order and rational thought. The heat from the computers means that the room is always toasty-warm, and it is sufficiently removed from the rest of the building that one can play one’s French horn at any time, day or night; there is even a television, for when one would rather watch the National Geographic channel without ‘humorous’ commentary about beavers, etc. from other parties.
The Van Doren Wave Oscillator is a METI instrument of Ruprecht’s own devising. The idea is quite simple: the VDWO takes sounds (for example the main theme of Pachelbel’s Canon, played on French horn) and translates them into the full spectrum of frequencies, including those outside human – but perhaps not extraterrestrial – hearing, and broadcasts them into space.
‘Blowjob, what’s the point of playing a load of boring music into space? You want them to think that everyone on Earth is like a hundred years old?’
‘As a matter of fact, classical music has much to recommend it as a means of communication. On the one hand, it’s a mathematical system, which any intelligent being will be able to understand; on the other, it gives an insight into the physiological nature of humans, musical features such as drone, repetition, percussion, being based on heartbeats, breathing, and so forth. Professor Tamashi has a very interesting paper on the subject.’
‘Oh right, I must have missed that somehow.’
The Wave Oscillator has had its fair share of teething problems; however, today Ruprecht thinks he might finally have these sorted out. Taking it from the worktop – the VDWO is an innocuous rectangular affair about the size of a mid-range box of chocolates – he plugs it gingerly into the mains and steps back. Nothing explodes or catches fire. Good. He switches it on. A red light comes on and an efficient-sounding hum. Ruprecht seats himself in a chair and takes his French horn from its case. He pauses momentarily before beginning, eyeing the door. He usually likes to have Skippy around when doing test runs, but he disappeared after History class and hasn’t replied to any of Ruprecht’s texts. Well, if he wants to miss out on the scientific event of the century, that’s his lookout.