For Billy
Contents
“Shall I tell you?”
“What?”
“Shall I?”
“Tell me what?” said Jan.
“What do you want to know?”
Jan picked up a fistful of earth and trickled it down the neck of his shirt.
“Hey!”
“Stop fooling, then.”
Tom shook his trouser legs. “That’s rotten. I’m all gritty.”
Jan hung her arms over the motorway fence. Cars went by like brush marks. “Where are they going? They look so serious.”
“Well,” said Tom. “Let’s work it out. That one there is travelling south at, say, one hundred and twenty kilometres per hour, on a continental shelf drifting east at about five centimetres per year—”
“I might’ve guessed—!”
“—on a planet rotating at about nine hundred and ninety kilometres per hour at this degree of latitude, at a mean orbital velocity of thirty kilometres per second—”
“Really?”
“—in a solar system travelling at a mean galactic velocity of twenty-five kilometres per second, in a galaxy that probably has a random motion—”
“Knickers.”
“—random knickers of about one hundred kilometres per second, in a universe that appears to be expanding at about one hundred and sixteen kilometres per second per megaparsec.”
Jan scooped up more earth.
“The short answer’s Birmingham,” he said, and ducked.
Jan looked across the flooded sand quarry behind them towards the Rudheath caravan site among the birch trees. “Come on.” The earth was still in her hand.
“Where?”
“What were you going to tell me?”
“Oh, that.” He took his shoe off and turned it upside down. “It really is grotty being gritty. I was going to tell you when I first saw you.”
“When was it?”
“When you came back from Germany.”
“Germany?” The earth ran through her fingers. “Germany? We’ve known each other longer than that.”
“But I didn’t see you until you got out of the car: and then I – saw you.”
“I wasn’t away more than a fortnight.”
“What was it like?”
“Anywhere.”
“The people you stayed with?”
“Ordinary.”
“So why go?”
“To see what it was like.”
“And she found that the ground was as hard, that a yard was as long—No. She found that a metre was neater—”
“Tom—”
“Yes?”
“Lay off.”
He put his head on her shoulder. “I couldn’t stand it if you went now,” he said. They walked from the motorway fence along a spit of sand between the lakes.
“‘Grotty’ is excessively ugly,” said Tom. “A corruption of ‘grotesque’. It won’t last.”
“I love you.”
“I’m not sure about the mean galactic velocity. We’re with M31, M32, M33 and a couple of dozen other galaxies. They’re the nearest. What did you say?”
“I love you.”
“Yes.” He stopped walking. “That’s all we can be sure of. We are, at this moment, somewhere between the M6 going to Birmingham and M33 going nowhere. Don’t leave me.”
“Hush,” said Jan. “It’s all right.”
“It’s not. How did we meet? How could we? Between the M6 and M33. Think of the odds. In all space and time. I’m scared.”
“Don’t be.”
“Scared of losing—”
“You’re not—”
“I always win.”
She pressed the back of her hand against his cheek.
“Tell me,” he said. “I’ve been waiting all afternoon.”
The motorway roared silently. Birds skittered the water in flight to more distant reeds, and the iron water lay again, flat light reflecting no sky. The caravans and the birches. Tom.
“Next week,” said Jan. “Right?” Her knuckles were comfortless between his. “Next week. I go next week.” She tried to reach the pain, but his eyes would not let her in.
“London?”
“Yes.” Teeth showing through lips drawn: lines from sides of nostrils: frown and pain lines. “And my parents—”
“It’s a pretty mean galaxy.”
She pulled him to her. “You’re just a baby.”
“Yes.”
“Upset.”
“I’m not upset. I’m panicking. Love me.”
“I do. I do love you.”
“For ever.”
“How—”
“Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”
“Quote.”
“More know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows. And that’s another.” He stood back from her and bent down to skim a stone across the lake. “On one side lay the M6, and on one lay a great water, and the site was full. Seven bounces! Bet you can’t do more than three!”
“Which of you am I supposed to believe?” said Jan.
“Both.”
“When will you grow up?”
“We were born grown up.”
“I love you: you idiots.”
They went round the caravan site by the sand washer. It was a tower, with chutes that fed sand into a piled cone. There was a catwalk to the top, over the chutes. The top was a very small steel plate.
Tom