How I Wonder What You Are Read online

  The shoes sat on the window ledge in what he remembered as the old farm office. In his uncle’s day the room had been mostly occupied by an enormous table strewn with papers, the walls covered in calendars and notes from one agricultural agency after another. He’d always been able to tell when Uncle Peter was in there by the fact that the big grey collie took up station outside the door and lay, one baleful eye pressed to the crack, full-length on the hallway flagstones like a mouldy rolled carpet.

  Phinn turned slowly around, seeing the ghosts of clutter amid the quiet chilly spaces. One day, maybe, it could be like that again, with a family clustering in the kitchen drinking wine and eating home-made cake, the living room serious with the tick of a grandfather clock and the little parlour cosily jammed with upholstery and ornaments. One day. Maybe. But not for him.

  He dragged the air bed from its slowly deflating position in the little bedroom and set it up downstairs under the big window in the kitchen. It beat sitting on flagstones – he was sure he could feel the coming of incipient piles even after only a fortnight of those chilly floors – and the natural light made it easier to read his scribbly handwriting and the hastily made printouts. ‘British Organisation for the Investigation of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.’ ‘Right. Yeah, bet they introduce themselves as members of Boiwap,’ he muttered to himself. ‘They must have a really great PR person.’

  But the print blurred even with his glasses on. His eyes skipped over the text, drawn irresistibly to the doorway, through which he could see into the old office, and those shoes side by side, backlit by a glorious March sun like a magazine illustration.

  A sudden bad-tempered gust rattled the windows and one of the shoes fell sideways. As the wind continued to agitate through the gaps in the ancient wooden frames, the shoe scuffed its way along the stone ledge and Phinn leaped through the room just in time to catch it before it made its draught-assisted way to the floor by way of a serious amount of dust and a pile of mouse-droppings that looked as though they had been passed down through the generations.

  ‘Oh, all right! I’ll take them back.’ He found himself shouting into the emptiness. ‘Satisfied now?’ His words rang back at him from the stone but he thought the echo held notes of quiet complacency, as though the house itself was feeling smug about forcing him into a task he’d thought he could delay at least until he could be sure that Molly was out.

  Only because you’re tired of looking such a complete dork in front of her. Not, for example, because you quite like that sparky look that comes into her eye when she winds you up. Or because those eyes remind you of something you once felt, someone you once felt for. Or you wonder what it would be like to touch that delinquent hair, or because you’re intrigued by her shape. Or even because she’s already seen you naked twice and not laughed or thrown up, which has got to be a good thing, no?

  Wishing he hadn’t promised Link that he’d stop drinking – because a couple of stiff vodkas would have put paid to that irritatingly shrill voice inside his head – Phinn stuffed the shoes into a plastic carrier and went back outside.

  The wind had knives in it. The sunlight which had looked so soft and pleasant from inside was now revealed to be all style and no substance, a pale yellow wash over ground hard as rock and a fake blue sky. He hustled quickly along the street, past the shop where he could swear the same two women stood gossiping every day and onto the row of little cottages, with his footsteps loud against the chilly pavement. To his left the river ran dark and deep, sluicing under the bridge like blood down an artery. The sound of its gurgling process made him shiver and shrug deeper into his jacket with the bag swinging on his arm as he thrust both hands into pockets and raised his shoulders to his ears.

  It didn’t sound any less scary with the noise half blocked out. Phinn tried to tell himself that it was just a river, made suddenly deeper by the rain falling higher in the moors. Water on the move. Nothing sinister about it. But when a tree trunk came sailing down, borne swiftly by the power of the waters, one branch raised to the sky like a drowning victim going under for the third time, his breathing increased until he was nearly gasping. His hands were sweating on the plastic handles of the bag and his pace increased until he was almost running by the time he reached Molly’s front door.

  For the second time in two days he knocked, waited, heard nothing. But this time the sound of his heartbeat was loud in his ears and a panicky sweat was sticking his T-shirt to his back and he didn’t really care whether she was in or not. He turned the handle and the door opened and he half-fell into the hallway, the carrier bag bobbing at his elbow and the shoes inside repeatedly kicking him in the hip.

  He heard Molly laughing as soon as he was inside and, despite himself and his nameless anxiety, he found he was smiling. ‘Molly?’

  No answer. But the soft giggle came again from the living room and he put his head around the door to look in.

  ‘What the … where did you come from?’ Molly leaped to her feet removing the earphones she’d been wearing. She had her laptop open on the table, had obviously been listening to something, not able to hear his knock or his voice.

  ‘I … it was …’ Phinn held up the bag. ‘Shoes.’

  ‘Shoes?’

  ‘I did knock, but you were …’ He waved a hand at the computer. ‘I’ll just leave them here, shall I?’ He bent to disentangle the handles of the bag which had spun themselves tightly around his arm and locked into place in a plastic cat’s cradle. He was trying to rotate them in the opposite direction and ignore the pain of the sharp heels as they spun and gouged his hip, when Molly moved towards him.

  ‘Phinn. Look. Earlier. I’m sorry. Really sorry. I didn’t know.’

  The bag spun a dizzying dance and he found he couldn’t look away from its green and white logo. ‘About what?’

  Without speaking again Molly pressed a couple of keys and turned the laptop. He stopped fiddling with the bag, pushed his glasses up his nose and focused on the screen. She’d Googled him and pulled down a news piece with the headline ‘Physics-breakthrough Doctor’s Wife drowns’. There was a picture of Suze too.

  ‘You knew she died.’

  Molly shook her head. ‘Not like this, Phinn. This is … horrible. I thought, when you said she died, it was, like, I dunno, illness or something. Not this.’

  ‘But you were laughing. I heard you.’

  ‘I Googled you to find that YouTube clip you were on about. I wanted to take a look before I told Mike. It’s very funny. You were very funny. It’s a brilliant talk.’

  Phinn remembered it well. A somewhat dumbed-down version of his recent research results, given to an amateur astronomers’ dinner when he’d been so white-hot with happiness that he could have made a discussion about serial killers amusingly entertaining. That feeling of having everything come right, the world being in perfect balance and everything so good that it shone like diamonds. That feeling. The one he’d lost and never looked for again.

  ‘Yeah, well. Shit happens,’ he said, standing awkwardly in the doorway. Didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to remember that river running past outside, black and thick like blood or nightmares.

  ‘Not like this. Phinn.’ She came over and touched his arm and all the tape that held him together came undone.

  ‘We’d split up. She didn’t like my work, my friends, my style, my life. She’d thought I was going to be famous, that we were going to be famous, like she’d be some kind of scientific It girl, travelling the world and wining and dining the glitterati while I won Nobel prizes and discovered new theories and solved the world’s problems through a telescope.’

  The words came out in a rush. He had no way of stoppering them, they seemed to have been dammed up there behind his brain for so long now. ‘She walked out when it wasn’t like that. When I wasn’t there, when I wasn’t famous, wasn’t getting my picture in the Times every week. I wasn’t what she’d signed up for, she said.’

  H
is legs gave way and he folded down onto the sofa. At his side the green and white bag rotated and settled snug against his leg.

  ‘But you said she came back?’ Molly’s voice seemed to come from a long way away. Years away. From a future he’d never planned.

  ‘She was gone about six months. I’d … I was surviving. Thrown myself into my work, y’know?’ He raised his head to catch those blue, blue eyes on him, gave a stupid smile. ‘Typical bloke, me. But she came back, Molly. Said it had all been a mistake, that she wanted me, even with my imperfections.’ Another grin, little more than stretching his mouth. ‘Oh, she had a list of those. I’m not perfect, who’d have thought?’ He stretched the arm out and watched the bag rotate again, feeling everything being dragged around inside him as though his internal organs were being re-arranged. ‘About two weeks later she told me she was pregnant.’

  ‘Phinn, don’t. It’s none of my business.’ Molly sat beside him. Her eyes were on the bag too now, he noticed, as though looking at him was too painful.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. It’s not as bad as it was. Still hurts, here,’ and he jerked a fist towards his breastbone, wanting to punch himself for doing this, for spreading the pain in her direction. ‘But it’s fading. She died over a year ago now.’

  ‘Yes, it said. On the … thing.’

  ‘December. The twenty-first of December.’ He gasped in a breath that hitched. ‘We’d argued. We kept arguing. Everything was – broken. The love wasn’t … I can’t explain it, Molly. But she told me the baby wasn’t mine, she’d been with a couple of guys while we’d been separated, she wasn’t sure whose it was but it certainly wasn’t mine and … she didn’t want it anyway.’

  That awful, blazing night, when the frost had concreted the ground and the stars had been hard and lifeless in the sky. Suze, hands on her hips, lips drawn back to make her almost ugly, telling him things … things about himself that he’d never even suspected. Over a year ago. And it felt like yesterday.

  ‘And then she got in her car and drove away. They found her the next morning. Car had skidded on some ice, gone into the river and she’d drowned.’ Another deep breath. ‘Trapped in the car.’ Ice in her lungs, water holding her down like arms until she was blank-faced under the surface …

  The silence fell so thickly around them that Phinn felt the world had bubble-wrapped them both.

  ‘And that’s why you’re depressed? And the drinking?’

  ‘No. Yes. I don’t know, Molly, it wasn’t like I was … I just started drinking to help me sleep and then it got to be a habit or something. I never drank that much, only enough to take the edge off, until … Actually, until I came here. Until that first time with the lights. The depression … that’s a lot of stuff that Suze … that what happened, brought to the surface. Childhood, stress. I see … I saw someone, back in Bristol, once a week for six months, and it was helping.’ He ran a hand through his hair, pushing it back as though he could push the memories back with it. ‘My life has been pretty screwed up all along, really.’

  Molly stood up. He felt the chill against his body where she’d been sitting as though something precious had been taken away. ‘Molly? Where are you going?’ He hadn’t meant to have that note of slightly high-pitched desperation in his voice but she didn’t seem to notice it.

  ‘Phinn, I’m British, where do you think I’m going? To make some tea.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’ Stand down girlie-panic.

  ‘You want some?’

  This time his breath reached his lungs. ‘Please.’ And when he moved his arm the bag slid sweetly over his hand, landing on the carpet with the shoes upright and side by side again as though neatly positioned in their plastic transport. ‘And whomsoever the shoe fits …’ he muttered with a sudden flashback to childhood.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She came back bearing two mugs of orange tea and a small plate of custard creams. He was mildly reassured to find that she hadn’t taken British Woman in Time of Crisis to the extreme of forming the biscuits into a flower-petal pattern on the plate.

  ‘Where did you get those?’ She was looking at the shoes, then at him, with an expression that seemed to imply that she thought he’d been rummaging in her wardrobe.

  ‘You sort of ran out of them last night. I didn’t like to leave them out in the rain so …’ He gesticulated with his mug and tea slopped gently over his arm. ‘Then I worried about them getting damp or nasty in my place, so I brought them back.’

  ‘Oh.’

  They sipped tea genteelly, taking the occasional biscuit but not speaking. Phinn was surprised that the unease he’d been feeling for weeks now seemed to have dropped away, as though telling Molly about Suze had exorcised some demon he’d been carrying unawares. It felt as though a tiny little light in the back of his soul had finally been switched on.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, dunking his custard cream. ‘I’m sorry about earlier. In the car. I shouldn’t have pried into your life like that. It’s nothing to do with me how you choose to live, or where, or what your family is to you. I should have known better, I mean it’s not exactly as though I’m one of the Waltons myself. So. Yeah. Sorry.’

  Molly shrugged. ‘Did your wife really think you were going to win a Nobel prize?’ She picked up one of the shoes and examined the heel.

  ‘Maybe. I did some work a while back on the multi-universe theory, where I proved that light moves through more dimensions than our four, and if we ever work out a practical application for that then I guess I’ll be in line. Behind the guy who invented edible soap probably.’

  ‘Wow. You are really clever.’

  ‘What, as opposed to just knowing a lot about galactic rotation curves? Nah, not that clever. I have a brain that works in a particular way really, really well, so that I can work out solutions to problems that people don’t even understand to be problems. It’s more of a knack than massive intelligence.’

  ‘You still have her picture in your wallet.’

  Phinn looked at Molly. She was carefully avoiding his gaze, concentrating fiercely on her tea. ‘Yes,’ he said softly, wondering why she’d brought it up.

  ‘You must miss her.’

  ‘Sometimes. Mostly I miss the life we had together. You know the sort of thing, Sunday breakfasts, going to the cinema – all that. Walking hand in hand in the rain. Not that we ever did walk hand in hand in the rain, but it’s the image, isn’t it? Being with someone, I miss that. Not always, because I’m a real bastard when I’m working and I just want to be left alone but … oh, wet knickers on the radiators and Tampax in the cupboard and cup marks on the carpets.’

  Someone to hold me. When the theories don’t work, when the numbers don’t add up and I want to hide, someone who’s there, quietly on my side. He didn’t say any of that, of course. He didn’t need to tell her about his emotional neediness – Suze had thrown that in his face with such force that it had probably left an indelible mark that every woman could read.

  ‘I’ve been thinking.’ Molly put her cup down with such finality, such clarity of purpose that Phinn was almost frightened as to what she was going to propose. God, she wasn’t going to suggest something physical, was she? Some kind of friends-with-benefits thing? Something inside him trembled like a plucked wire.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Those lights. We need to track them somehow. Which direction they come from, which way they disappear – we need to be up on the high moor when they come over so that we can get a better view.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Not a good idea?’

  ‘Oh, no, no, it’s a great idea. Excellent.’ Baxter, you prat. And now look at you, you’re disappointed, aren’t you? Even though if she had suggested anything you’d have run so fast you’d have hit escape velocity five minutes ago. ‘No. Really.’ Phinn tried to look alert. ‘How do we do it?’

  She gave him a grin which made him wonder, for a brief, hot-skinned moment, whether she knew what he’d been thinking.
‘I’m glad you asked. I’ve got one or two ideas.’

  * * *

  After Phinn left I found myself watching the YouTube clip again, trying to transpose the man I knew with the man on the screen. That Phinn Baxter was a shorter-haired, neatly dressed version, clean-shaven to reveal a nice jawline and wearing contacts to show off those big, black eyes. He moved with a certainty that my Phinn never used, as though his body was obedient rather than wilful, spoke quickly and with precision but also with well-timed humour and his smile had a charismatic wideness that had the audience hanging on his words.

  And he was funny, intelligent and glamorous, moving around the small dais with his computer clicking from slide to slide in a PowerPoint of perfection. Not a word wasted or a pun misplaced. So what the hell had happened to turn this together guy into the self-conscious, inept man that fell into cesspits and passed out drunk on the moors? That Phinn looked a million miles away from the person who didn’t shave and wore musty old T-shirts. But then, that Phinn worked the room with his smile and was clearly enjoying himself in the middle of a rapt crowd.

  What had happened?

  It couldn’t only have been the loss of his wife. Okay, the shock of that might have wiped out his confidence, and the way she’d left him had obviously knocked him completely flat, but it wouldn’t have taken away his belief in his own abilities, his own sense of himself. Something else had gone on, something he hadn’t wanted to mention. I found myself frowning at the spot on the sofa where he’d been sitting as though I could interrogate his imprint on the cushions for answers.

  But what business was it of mine, really? Doctor Phinneas Baxter was just someone who had breezed into my life on a temporary basis. He made no demands on me, wanted nothing from me and I, in my turn, was slightly reassured by my purely physical reaction to him. I’d been beginning to think that Tim … that what Tim had done … had turned my sex drive off at the mains switch. I’d not managed to work up a healthy case of lust for any man since, even the so-called hunks on the TV left me limp with a lack of appreciation, but something about Phinn made my eyes want to follow him.