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The Apollo lands in the Sea of Tranquillity and, before stepping out, Buzz Aldrin celebrates Communion with a chalice lent to him by a Presbyterian church. On the Moon, he appreciates one-sixth gravity and the sense of direction it gives him, a feeling of being somewhere, he says, something he will miss once home, where he drinks too much and suffers from bipolar disorder, quite understandable in a person who has flown so high, achieving a flight of true distinction, only to splash down suddenly to hopeless dreams of return.
—See my planet, says the prince. Right above us … but so far!
—So what are you doing here?
From here to there. How far? Not very.
Robert Falcon Scott. Wednesday, March 21. Got within 11 miles of depot Monday night; had to lay up all yesterday in severe blizzard. Thursday, March 29. Last entry. For God’s sake, look after our people.
From here to there. What do I need? A small suitcase, a fine pair of shoes. A tiny nip of venom, a stroke of a knife. Escape velocity.
Gravity is a universal law of attraction. Escape velocity is the minimum speed required to keep moving away from a planet or star without falling back to the surface or entering a closed orbit around it, and gravitational pull diminishes the farther the surface of a star or planet is from its centre. In the case of a black hole, a star with a concentration of matter so dense it falls in on itself, and with a gravitational field so strong, spacetime, as Karl Schwarzschild first explained, will curve around it and close it off from the rest of the Universe so nothing can escape it, not even light, trapped in a body whose radius is less than a certain critical number, and where the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light. This is the Schwarzschild radius, a short straight line to the horizon of a black hole through which no signal can pass, named after Karl, astronomer, pioneer in optics, soldier, German Jew, b.1873, d.1916, winner of a posthumous Iron Cross for his pains on the eastern front, a horizon, you might say, he never escaped.
Black hole, dark star, dark matter, over 90 per cent of the Universe is invisible, unknowable. So far. Black hole, foxhole, dugout, trench, dead soldier, unknown soldier, mark him with a cross. Lost, stolen or strayed. Dark matters. I will find her. What do I need?
Begin with an eye.
Galileo will go blind, but in 1609 he points a telescope at the Moon from his garden in Padua, and in the shadows, he finds mountains and seas, writing, ‘Its brighter part might very fitly represent the surface of the land and the watery regions darker.’
An eye is a camera and it is 80 per cent water, forming in the dark of the womb into a small sphere with a lens in front, and a screen at the back with 137 million separate seeing elements, and nerve lines leading to the brain where out of a storm of electrical charges, a picture ought to appear, with all the qualities a person expects, of colour and light, contour and transparency, near and far. The eye is subject to tiny flaws and aberrations, everything has to be right, the pressure in the aqueous solution determining the shape of an eye whose lens must be clear as glass, and curved just so, and placed at the correct distance to focus the light on to the retina with its photosensitive cells, able to screen and unscreen, and produce the purple pigment that will allow for seeing in low-lit rooms, call it visual purple.
I trap the light, I remember everything, nothing escapes me, and I see marvellous things, no ticket required, a great picture show, one night only, every night, a spectacular! Son et lumière, a starry cast, and I can see clearly, I’ve got visual purple.
The first time I saw you, Mummy, you wore a red dress. It was red velvet and very slim-fitting, and you smiled at me and reached out with long sensitive fingers, a small gesture of infinite grace. I remember, even though I was only eight days old. I saw you.
TWO
When Gus came home that first time, wrapped up in Harriet’s pink baby blanket, I had a thought regarding Mum and unknown origins, and how you might expect a foundling to be a bit edgy about babies of her own, worrying, perhaps, they will go astray like a gang of puppies in a park, to be scooped up later by a dog-catcher, unless they meet a bad end in the sweeping beams of onrushing cars, like sorry spies in wartime.
The dog-catcher delivers them to a dog home, a Salvation Army type place, but for dogs, and now they are puppies of unknown origin, each one hoping for a person to come along and choose him, and take him to a better place, but whatever happens, even if the new owner is one fine person, the dog will always be looking over his dog shoulder for the other puppies and his first home, and wondering what happened and was it his fault, etc., and maybe give in to a lifelong identity crisis, who knows.
Clearly, this dark matter of unknown origins is not a problem for Mum, because instead of looking over her shoulder and acting edgy, she has gone all out for babies, with Gus the latest, and between the day he first came to us up to now, I can only recall a single event which might be understood as an open display of nerves on her part, and that was the day of the Harness Affair, when Mum unwrapped a parcel before our very eyes, unfolding leaf after leaf of white tissue paper to reveal an arrangement of white suede straps resembling reins, reins most typically attached to sledge dogs in Antarctic regions.
‘For you, Gus!’
‘Mum,’ I say. ‘Um. He doesn’t have a dog. We don’t have a dog. Are we getting one?’
‘No, no!’ she says, laughing now, and tickling me in the neck so I don’t feel too much of an eejit. ‘It’s for holding Gus. In busy roads. Until he is older.’
Well, blow me down. I never knew they made leashes for kids. One time I strapped it on Gus myself and held on patiently, waggling the reins a little in an encouraging manner, waiting for him to go walkabout in the garden.
‘Walk on!’ I said, which is what coachmen say to coach horses in old films. ‘Walk on, Gus!’
And Gus just stands there, in contemplation of the flowers or something, not budging an inch.
‘Roses,’ he says.
‘Right. Roses.’
I am not worried that Gus’s vocabulary is limited at present to the names of flowers. He has a long life ahead of him and therefore it is not a cause for anxiety in me. Neither am I all that worried about accidents of the scurrying into traffic kind. This baby is simply not aiming to scoot off anywhere in a reckless manner, I don’t think so. He is not the type.
I unstrap the harness and have a go on Harriet. I ought to have foreseen the difficulties ahead. Harriet is very meek and polite as I wrangle with straps and buckles and then her eyes grow large and suddenly she is scampering all over the joint at gallop speed with me flying on behind, missing a step or two, until I realise I just do not have to be doing this, grappling on to my sister in a frenzy of determination like a charioteer in a chariot race, no. I drop the reins and decide to let her be a wild pony in a field all by herself, the harness flapping loose, and me going in for deep breaths on the sidelines. Bloody.
The thing is, Mum never used the harness on Gus. I believe there was just something about it she fell for, the soft white leather, the beautiful silver buckles, the idea of it, I don’t know, but I saw it, two years or so into Gus’s life, how Mum has her own way with this dark matter of unknown origins, how it is different for everyone maybe, one person ending up a one-man band, taking no chances on spreading out and having a family that might go astray, and another being Mum, fearless, filling a whole house with kids, no leashes required. It works the same in a bad-mood situation, my sister, for instance, turning to song and dance in moments of strife and confusion whereas I imagine even worse calamities, hoping my bad situation might seem rosy in the fearsome light of my imaginings, and now it’s just a habit, I can’t stop it, my bad mood opening a door on a whole roomful of bad-mood ideas, such as naval disasters and captains going down with ships, and firing squads, and amputations in wartime, no anaesthetic, and so on, and then I usually feel a lot worse. Clearly, my method is not a prize-winning method. I may need to review the situation.
Sometimes my dad helps out. If he happens to come along and catch me in a pathetic droop over some maths homework I am messing up, or a drawing of footballers that is an outright disaster because I have been so busy doing all the muscles in their legs, I have not noticed, until too late, there is no space left to draw heads and sky. It’s awful. This is when my dad will do a boxing count in a loud boxing referee voice, and a frantic sports commentator voice, while raising one arm in the air above me, to bang it down sharpish on each count, his pointy finger grazing the top of my drooping head.
One! Two! Three! … IS SHE OUT FOR THE COUNT? Six! Seven! …’
Etc. It is pretty annoying, except that I do perk up before he reaches the count of ten, braving this task of recovery with show-off vigour and a spirit of endeavour, whereupon my dad walks off beaming, because he has sorted me out again, and all it takes is to yell a boxing count over my head and waltz off to tell Mum the fine job he did. Jem is OK now. Well done, Dad.
My mother is the top person to seek out in perilous times, at any station from mystery grumps to head wounds. A head wound can bring on stark-eyed horror and a sense of being pretty close to the end of things, like dropping out of an aeroplane on to enemy territory, and at times like this, she can calm me straight down while patching me up, until suddenly I am interested in how the head bleeds (profusely), and I have a new word (profusely) and a new subject.
To begin. There are groups for blood. I never knew that. Anyway, the main idea is not to mingle the groups in emergency situations, when you might be running low on blood and need someone else’s for a top-up. You have to check first off about groups. Whoa! Hold on! What group are you? If you are too weak, you must hope for someone to ask on your behalf, so it might be best just to leave a note in some handy place upon your person, with the name of your group in neat writing. Or simply make sure never to be alone in a dangerous place, never to be without a member of your family who has the right blood, the same type, that’s how it goes, it’s a family thing. OK. Next. Blood is made of cells and platelets. Cells come in red and white. In red there is haemoglobin, meaning iron plus globin. What is globin? I don’t know. I could not pay attention, too busy wondering about this news there is iron in me, and having visions of blacksmiths in bare chests and leather aprons plunging bits of iron into boiling vats, and then bashing them into horseshoes and weapons, farm implements and household knives, red sparks flying everywhere, like drips of haemoglobin perhaps, so the blacksmith is in a state of wonder also, not about ironworks in him, but about blood in the ironworks. It’s possible.
Haemoglobin is responsible for colour and carrying oxygen, and white cells are for fighting off disease and so on, and then there are platelets. Very important. Platelets are for clotting, i.e. to stop all your blood flowing out after injury, the blood going from watery to sticky and hard, reminding me of the coating on toffee apples. It’s all very interesting, and pretty soon, listening to Mum, I lose my throw-uppy feeling, waiting out for it keenly, this clotting of platelets, and thinking deeply on the subject of blood flow, and the whole business of ferrying and fighting, and how I am in this O group, Mum says, which will be a breeze to recall in an emergency situation as it is the shape of a mouth calling out after injury, before the clotting part of things, white bandages, some nice toast with Cheddar, and friendly cuffs in the upper arm from immediate family, same as winning a medal. For Valour.
On other days, without a wound to show for it, everything hurts for no good reason, and I want to unzip my body and make a hasty exit, slamming the door on myself, no goodbyes.
‘Mum! Everything hurts!’
‘Growing pains,’ replies my mother who is in the know about such matters.
‘Oh.’
My mother is sitting at her dressing table with the lovely bottles on it, some with little tubes poking out and bulbs you squish, as in Ben’s chemistry set, except these are covered in velvet with golden tassels and are not dangerous to play with. The table has delicate drawers and one of them contains wide silver bracelets that are great for armlets when Jude and I are Romans. Mum lets us borrow them, no problem, and sometimes we invite Harriet to join in, because the bracelets fit right around her ankles and she is so good at slaves, though we tell her straight off she is a mute slave, otherwise she might mess up the game with inappropriate dialogue. We keep her instructions brief. For instance, we make sure not to tell her she had her tongue cut out in torture, or she will go overboard in terms of emotions and take over the whole game and it will be embarrassing. Harriet is not always appropriate but one day, maybe, she will be famous for acting.
Over the creamy gold wood surface of Mum’s table with the design of twigs and leaves carved in it, is a thin sheet of glass, kind of like ice, and there are mirrors at this table, a middle mirror that tips to and fro, and two side ones you can adjust the way my dad does in our car, frowning as he reaches up to twiddle the oblong driver mirror, like someone has done sabotage and moved it on purpose, then he fixes the side mirrors, wing mirrors, he calls them, and plunges out his window, before stretching across the passenger seat to do the other one, huffing and puffing the whole time. They have to be angled just right, so he can see what’s coming, and I suppose Mum can do the same, fiddle about with her wing mirrors so she can see who is coming in the room, such as Dad with a glass of wine, or me, today, with growing pains I am not thinking about any more.
The dressing-table mirrors are framed in creamy gold wood also, reminding me of famous paintings in museums, those three-in-one pictures with a middle bit and right and left bits connected by hinges, but here the famous painting is always Mum. Three of her, one in three. Cool.
When Gus came home that first time, it seemed to me things were just right, no more Weisses required. I’m not saying if Mum left us and bashed off to hospital again, coming home with one more Weiss wrapped in the pink blanket, my dad hovering and shoving us gently not so gently out of the way, that it would be not OK with me, no, it’s only a feeling. Things are just right. Now we are seven, counting Mum and my dad, not counting birds, i.e. two doves, two budgies and two finches so far, and how we might get a dog when Gus is bigger, but not yet, because at present any dog is bound to be bigger than Gus, which would be spooky for him, so we will hang on until he is round about dog-size, no smaller.
King Arthur must have felt this way too one day, thinking, OK, that’s enough knights, no more knights! King Arthur was very welcoming, and anyone brave and fine with good works in mind could come along and be a knight at his Table, and then the other knights would squish up to make room, while, of course, there were a few casualty knights making room for unhappy reasons (demise), but I do not see this accounting for all that many free places. There cannot have been endless space at the Round Table. In Arthur’s heyday, perhaps there was standing room also, but a great king ought to keep track of his knights, otherwise things will get slapdash and he might mix up everyone’s names, simply too tired to pay attention to each knight as is befitting, due to overcrowding of knights, with some of the more complicated ones, the softy knights, growing offended consequently, kind of hurt and dithery and likely to slip up on the job, I don’t know. It could happen so quickly.
I have borrowed Ben’s King Arthur book and it is the real thing, written nearly five hundred years ago and it has a French title, which is quite unusual, as the book is in English. I have read a few versions so far but they are not the real thing, the way those Bible storybooks for little kids with a lot of coloured drawings of animals and flowers and smiley types in tunics wandering about the countryside are not the real thing, and a bad mistake in my opinion, inviting high hopes and confusion. How are you going to break it to little kids as they grow up, that the Bible is not about farmyards in warm countries but a story featuring plenty of death and war and leprosy and so on? It won’t be easy, and I’ve seen it, how when the time comes to talk about strife in the Bible, nuns try to nip on by the strife parts and head straight for the miracle parts, because the bare facts have become a problem for them.
Take that twin brother story, the one about the sons of Isaac, Esau and Jacob. The Esau and Jacob story is really not hard to take for little kids, but the nuns make a right mess of it, thinking the only way to make it OK that the younger brother (Jacob) goes in for a passing phase of criminal behaviour is to say that the older brother (Esau) had a terrible personality and was extremely hairy, resembling a beast, making it OK what Jacob did, buying his land for only a few pence and then disguising himself by wearing a hairy jacket so their father would mistake him for Esau and give him a blessing as the firstborn, which is a top important blessing, and ought to have gone to Esau, but Esau is very hairy and not all that smart, making everything OK but very confusing for kids regarding men and beasts, and land deals, and whether or not hairy = bad. What a mess.
Mum cleared this story up for me in no time and here’s how I see it. Jacob slipped up due to extreme youth. It’s forgivable. He fell into criminal activity because he did not know how to come out with it plain, how he is a leader of men and Esau is not, and maybe Jacob should get the firstborn blessing so he can get on with being a leader of men. Plus, Esau is only interested in hunting, he is not one bit interested in farming and being a leader of men, meaning he and Jacob can shake hands in later life, and bury the hatchet, because Esau is happy with the turn of events, free now to hunt at all hours with no other responsibilities, reminding me of Westerns, where there are two main types of cowboy, the homesteader-farmer type and the hunter-cattleman type, and the homesteader is usually more sensitive, and has a long-term view of matters, whereas the cattleman is always rushing around on horseback and shooting from the hip, as the saying goes. A hunter is prone to rash behaviour, and excitable activities, deep thinking is simply not his bag, and this is how I will break the story to Harriet when the time comes. I cannot leave it to nuns. The Bible ought to be a nun’s best subject, a real thing and not a story about farmyards in warm countries, but this is clearly not the case. Oh well.
Ben’s King Arthur book is definitely the real thing, and it is very good. It is complicated.
‘Jem, you’re a bit young,’ Ben says, handing over Le Morte D’Arthur. He says it gentle, not bossy. ‘You’re not ready’
‘I’m ready, Ben.’
‘Well, remember the glossary at the back, OK?’
‘Glossary?’
‘See? See what I mean?’
‘What? See what?’
Here is why the book is complicated. 1) There are 999 pages in it. In two volumes comprising XXI Books comprising maybe 35 chapters each, though every chapter has a handy headline at the beginning, announcing the main topics and events therein, which is very helpful, without spoiling the suspense as you might suppose. 2) There are odd words here, ones not in the dictionary. If Ben is passing, he will help. Or I can flip to the glossary at the back, which is sometimes no help, as I have to look up the meanings of meanings, there being an example of this straight off, right there in the ‘a’ list.
Assoil v. to absolve.
I skip down the list. Ubblye n. oblation.
Then there are words with two separate meanings, completely different ones. Memorising these is recommended, so you only have the one job of picking the right meaning, and no second job of flipping to the glossary also. Example: wot v. to know/to blame. Whoa! It seems to me knowing a person and blaming a person are completely different things. Maybe not.
When you have to look up the meanings of meanings, and memorise at least some, so you can read a few pages in peace without filching in the glossary, and/or getting up for a dictionary every two minutes, things are complicated, but I don’t care, I am in a fever to learn this book and reach the parts Ben has already read out to me, such as the part about the Round Table and how it is symbolic, which is how I can sort this problem of too many knights and concentrate instead on symbolism, how King Arthur flung his arms open wide in a welcoming and heartfelt manner that is a bit symbolic, with no stampede of knights or anything, no dangerous overcrowding, a bad scene caused by my dodgy thinking, my concentration on numbers and hard facts instead of symbolism also, and you have to go for both ways of thinking, or else you get mixed up and depressed.
I race ahead to the place Ben marked for me because I like it so much, the Round Table part which is also the Queen of the Waste Lands part, and I remember her especially because of the stupid thought I had at the time to do with nuns, and how they are always threatening me with starvation, pointing at my plate in an accusing fashion, at remains of spam and peas, or smears of rice pudding and rhubarb I am trying to hide under my cutlery, food I am WASTING, a terrible sight for a nun, and all she needs to get going with speeches on starvation in far-off lands, and that is what I saw the day Ben read to me about the Queen of the Waste Lands, a sad and angry nun waving her arms in the night sky, over a field of terrible waste, of spam and peas stretching to the horizon, out of reach of the starving children of India, and it is all my fault. Sorry, Sister.
The Queen of the Waste Lands is a recluse, having fallen on hard times. She used to have the most riches in the world and now she has Waste Lands, and this is symbolic, I believe, and to do with war and grave human failings, which is what she muses upon in her recluse, recluse being a person AND a place, she muses upon grave human failings and related topics, chiefly the Holy Grail, and who will find it, and will it be found, etc. OK. When she meets Perceval, who has dropped into her recluse for some road directions, he doesn’t know she is his auntie, maybe because she has undergone physical change in her new life as a recluse, or because they never met before, I don’t know. Never mind. When this matter is cleared up, she asks Perceval has he heard from his mother lately. When heard ye tidings? She asks, which is kind of a trick question, because she knows perfectly well Perceval’s mother died from grief, waving goodbye to her son as he bashed off to join the Round Table, but she won’t say so, no, she waits for him to say he has had no tidings, except in dreams. I dream of her much in my sleep, he says. And therefore, he adds, I wot not whether she be dead or alive.
Wot v. to know.
Now she tells him. Now he knows.
It’s all very interesting, and goes to show two things. First, how when you are a recluse your behaviour may be open to question, a recluse may lose touch with the niceties of behaviour and conversation, that’s one thing, and the other is how valour and dreaminess in a knight can go together, how dreams are not sissy or anything, and all the knights are apprised of this. This is why Merlin, or a passing gentlewoman, a complete stranger even, can step up and talk pretty freely on any manner of extravagant issues, such as God and dreams and symbols, etc., boldly interrupting some knightly chat, perhaps, about sports and jousts and war injuries and so on, and no one is embarrassed or annoyed. This is how it is when the Queen of the Waste Lands, who has lost touch with the niceties of regular conversation, addresses her nephew quite suddenly, and out of nowhere, it seems, on several pressing matters regarding the Round Table, such as why it is round / why he is sitting there / why his mother died waving goodbye to him when he left home to sit there / why there is an empty place no one can sit in / and why he has to go on a quest for the Grail which will heal the Lands, so they are not Waste Lands any more, whereupon he is expected to come back and sit in the special empty place. It’s an awful lot to take in in one go, and it’s symbolic, so Perceval listens carefully, though he is a bit young for symbolism and is no doubt wondering, is his auntie blaming him about his mother, and how much should he pack for the journey and how long will he be away, how many days, how many pairs of pants and hankies should he bring? Perceval is counting, instead of thinking about symbolism, and he is in a tizzy. He has a lot to learn, but he listens carefully. It’s a start.