Love and Other Thought Experiments Read online

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘I didn’t ring them back.’ In reply to Eliza’s next question. ‘There’s no rush.’

  Eliza focused on Arthur, steadily making his way through the banana. She was learning not to overreact to Rachel’s studied calm. Since the diagnosis they had settled into a pattern of Rachel’s fatalistic acceptance and Eliza’s eager cheerleading. It exhausted them both. Eliza had talked to Dr Marshall about changing the routine but it took time to ignore your instincts.

  ‘I’ll come with you. Hal can take Arthur.’

  ‘Daddy,’ said Arthur.

  ‘All those tests. Like the space collider. Put you in a tube and zap you and they still can’t find what they are looking for.’

  ‘I know.’ Eliza nodded. ‘How are you feeling?’

  Rachel lifted Arthur out of his chair. ‘I’m fine.’ She put the tip of her nose to their son’s. ‘Aren’t I?’

  The child looked up at his mother.

  ‘Ant,’ said Arthur.

  readkey;

  Eliza continued to see Sondra Marshall on her own. Once a week, she left Rachel and Arthur curled up together on the sofa and rode her bicycle to the house with the door on the side. Each time, while she waited for the therapist, she looked at the bell marked ‘House’ and thought of Rachel.

  ‘How are you doing?’ Dr Marshall settled into her chair.

  ‘Rachel’s chemo finished on Monday. She’s very quiet. But she doesn’t feel sick any more.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I miss her.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She’s dying.’

  Eliza looked toward the window at the far end of the office. She remembered Rachel leaning against it the first time they came to the house. Pressing her head to the glass.

  ‘And that changes how you feel about her?’

  ‘Everything we do together is in the past,’ Eliza said.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘She hasn’t got long. A year, maybe. Each day that passes is the last one.’

  ‘Aren’t all our lives like that?’ Dr Marshall nodded.

  ‘But we don’t have the luxury of denial.’

  ‘You think it would be better if you didn’t know?’

  Eliza shrugged. ‘There isn’t some other Rachel who didn’t get tested or who doesn’t have a tumour.’

  The therapist smoothed down her wrap around dress. She wore the same style every week in different colours but the paisley one had not been worn since their first visit. Eliza wondered if there was a system.

  ‘Is that what you want? A different Rachel?’

  ‘I want none of this to have happened.’

  ‘Where would you start erasing the past?’

  Eliza looked away. It was a trick question, but she knew where she would start. As soon as Rachel had mentioned the ants, she would have gone to the shop and paid the pest man to get rid of them. Eliza was a scientist, she did not think an ant had caused Rachel’s cancer, but without the ant between them they would be free.

  ‘Eliza?’

  Where would that leave them? Would she be facing the future alone now? Of course not, Arthur would have been born regardless of an imagined insect bite. She shook her head, as though the idea of the ant in Rachel’s head had somehow affected her own. Maybe it had. Not the physical mind, but the other part. The part that wondered how all these things were connected.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, ‘I have a child to think about. A son to raise without his mother.’

  ‘That will be hard,’ said Dr Marshall, ‘but he has you. And you have Rachel to help you prepare. It’s something you can do together, prepare a future for him that you both want.’

  ‘But I don’t want to live with a ghost,’ Eliza said, ‘I want Rachel.’

  Dr Marshall didn’t hesitate. ‘Rachel is there now. Are you?’

  There and not there, Eliza thought.

  end.

  It was a little after nine that night when Eliza returned home, and Rachel and Arthur were already asleep. She tucked her son’s legs under his covers and walked across the hall. The bedroom door was open and light spilled across the carpet from Rachel’s bedside lamp. Eliza stood in the doorway and watched her wife’s slender ribcage rise and fall. Rachel’s baby weight had left as suddenly as her hair, collateral damage, though the losses were not equally mourned.

  Eliza studied the hollowed cheeks and pale skin of Rachel’s face beneath her woollen hat. The chemotherapy hadn’t worked but there would be a period of remission before the cancer hit back. Rachel would feel better for a while. A ‘time to get everything in order’ the specialist had said. But what was orderly about dying before your parents? Before your child had grown up?

  She hadn’t said that to Rachel. She had listened while Rachel made plans. Schools for Arthur, special occasions; Rachel wanted to be part of the future. Rachel is there now, Dr Marshall had said, are you?

  She leant against the doorway as Rachel’s hand scratched under the hat. Was the ant moving around in Rachel’s dreams? The thought stopped Eliza’s breath. Since Rachel’s diagnosis Eliza couldn’t look at her wife without seeing the ant as well. The insect was part of their lives, a force within their relationship, a reason behind their family. If you love me, you will trust me, Rachel had said, and Eliza did. After all this time, she believed in the ant.

  Hello, World!

  For Arthur’s third birthday they went to Disneyland.

  Hal and Greg stayed behind.

  ‘They should have come,’ Rachel said. ‘Arthur would have loved making Greg go on a roller coaster.’

  ‘It’s a mystery,’ said Eliza.

  They both checked Arthur, staring through the glass of the hotel lift at the park below them.

  ‘Did you see his face when we arrived and that dog handed him a goody bag?’ Eliza said.

  ‘Pluto.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Arthur and I have been revising.’

  ‘The benefits of home schooling.’ Eliza took Rachel’s hand. ‘If you get tired, just say.’

  ‘You can’t get tired in the happiest place on earth.’ Rachel smiled.

  The three of them walked round the park in the late November sun.

  ‘We should always come to France for his birthday,’ Eliza said.

  ‘Always.’

  When they reached the teacup ride, Rachel sat nearby and Eliza queued with Arthur. It was the middle of the week and most children were in school but the line was still long. The cordon looped round several times, twisting back so that the same groups of people met every five minutes or so.

  ‘Where’s mummy?’ Arthur’s hand squirmed in Eliza’s as he strained to see Rachel beyond the crowd.

  ‘She’s over there, waiting for us.’ She pointed to Rachel’s outline, just visible under the café awning.

  Eliza lifted her son up on to her back and turned the next corner of the queue, brushing the arm of a man walking in the opposite direction who pulled himself away.

  ‘Excusez-moi,’ Eliza said.

  She glanced at the man and caught a glimpse of his scowling face as he shuffled down the line. Tanned, with grey stubble, and glossy, thinning hair. She recognised him, his bad temper, but he didn’t look back. The man from the television repair shop. She remembered his name, Kargin. What was Mr Kargin, the pest controller from Green Lanes, doing at Disneyland?

  ‘Mum!’ Arthur kicked at Eliza’s sides to make her move on.

  The teacups had stopped and the line lurched forward. Arthur smiled at the woman behind the barrier. As they passed through, Eliza looked for Kargin but the crowd surged towards the teacups and Arthur slid down and ran at the one furthest from them.

  ‘Blue cup.’ He ran until he reached it.

  The family in front of them swerved to the next teacup when they saw Arthur running with Eliza in tow.

  ‘Merci!’ Eliza shouted, though they looked more Peoria than Paris.

  They closed the door and settled b
ack into their seat.

  ‘Here, Arthur, you can turn the wheel and we’ll spin around.’

  Announcements blared through the loudspeakers and the music started. The cup moved off in a wide arc, gradually building momentum. Arthur stared at the shifting world around him.

  ‘Mummy.’

  ‘She’ll come and watch us. Turn the wheel, Arthur. That’s right.’

  The boy inched the wheel and when he felt the cup respond he redoubled his efforts, throwing his whole body in the direction of the spin. Eliza saw her own determined frown on his face as he held fast.

  ‘You’re doing that, Arthur. Look, there’s mummy.’

  The cup veered towards the fence and Eliza and Arthur both waved at a grinning Rachel who stood by the railings.

  ‘We’re going so fast.’ Eliza watched Arthur’s concentration return to the wheel as they spun away from Rachel. She looked up at the next teacup and saw the lone passenger inside, the pest man. There was no child beside him. No indication that anyone was waiting for him outside the ride.

  ‘Wait a minute, Arthur.’ She tried to stop the cup turning but they spun on and round and she saw Rachel leave the railings.

  ‘More,’ said Arthur. ‘Quick, quick.’

  There was no sign of the man or Rachel. Eliza sat back and thought about what she had seen. Mr Kargin from their old neighbourhood. The man whose temper had deterred them from using his or any other poison was on holiday with them. What did it mean? Eliza held on to the lip of the giant blue teacup and felt sick. It didn’t mean anything. Why was she thinking like that? Coincidences didn’t mean anything, unless you were Rachel’s mother with her second-hand analysis. Still, the saliva rose in her throat and she shivered despite the warmth of the Parisian autumn. Over four years since the ant had crawled into Rachel’s eye and here they were, on Arthur’s birthday, because of that night.

  She watched Arthur holding on to the wheel with all his might. Did he owe his life to an ant? she thought. She looked at his small hands, pink with the effort of turning the teacup round. Arthur and the ant, they were forever linked. She closed her eyes and the image of the ant flashed across her lids. The ant was not just in Rachel’s head, it was in her own. And whoever else knows, she thought, the ant will be with them too. I only have to tell this story and the ant will always be in their head.

  The ride slowed down and Arthur shouted.

  ‘Again!’

  ‘Maybe later.’ Eliza pushed at the tiny door and tried to steady herself as she climbed out. ‘I’m dizzy. Aren’t you?’

  ‘We went round.’ Arthur leant from side to side as they walked to the exit. ‘Round and round and …’

  ‘Arthur, please, stop.’ She turned to look at the emptying teacups but there was no sign of Mr Kargin.

  ‘Where’s mummy?’

  Eliza nodded at the bench where they had left her. Rachel was folded over her knees, one hand pressed to her head. Arthur slipped his hand from Eliza’s grasp and ran towards her.

  ‘Mummy, I pushed us, in the cup.’

  ‘I saw you.’ Rachel put her arms out for the boy. ‘So clever.’

  The boy wriggled from her lap and stood on the bench beside her, absorbed by the life of the park. Rachel took a deep breath, swept her newly grown hair behind her ear and smiled at Eliza.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, you.’ Eliza took her wife’s face with both hands and tilted her chin upwards. She could see straight into Rachel’s eyes. The red mark from four years earlier was visible by her cornea and there, on the white of the eye, a shadow, small and quick. Eliza blinked and the shadow was gone.

  She kept her hands on Rachel’s face and the two women sat for a long while on the bench with the clouds shifting above and their son beside.

  ‘It doesn’t hurt,’ Rachel said. ‘It doesn’t hurt at all.’

  2

  Game Changer

  The Prisoner’s Dilemma

  The dilemma involves two prisoners who are kept in separate cells and offered different deals according to whether they confess or betray each other. It has been shown that, while in the short term, an individual does better if they sell out the other prisoner, in the long term, when they know they will have to continue to deal with each other, the prisoners do better if they cooperate with each other.

  If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

  John von Neumann at the

  Association of Computing Machinery 1947

  I Cooperation

  Everybody called him Al. His parents didn’t mind, he was a popular boy and they saw how he fitted in with everyone, young and old, boys and girls, Greeks, Turks, even the British. Only his grandfather objected. But Ali didn’t pay attention. Baabanne was bad tempered.

  ‘He curdles the yoghurt,’ Ali’s mother said, ‘Pay no attention.’

  Ali thought of his grandfather as one of the goats he had to tend – with love and best kept at a distance. His parents owned a small guesthouse to the north of Larnaca, and the goats were part of the children’s day. Before and after school Ali and his sister herded them around the pastures and brought them in when needed. In summer there was also work for the children in the orange groves or whitewashing the many outside walls. When he wasn’t working outside Ali would follow Kostas the handyman around the property while he fixed things. Ovens and cars, lights and vacuum cleaners, there was nothing Kostas couldn’t mend. Ali watched as a little bit of wire or polish brought an object back to life.

  All summer long, when he had finished his chores, Ali went to the beach with his friends. As soon as he was done working, he would put on a t-shirt and shorts over his trunks, take some cold börek from the kitchen and rush to the door before his sister could catch up with him.

  ‘Bring your sister.’ Ali’s mother had an uncanny sense of her children’s location at any time of the day. ‘Hanife, go with your brother.’

  Then Ali would wait while Hanife packed a bag.

  ‘You don’t need a bag,’ Ali would say.

  ‘We’ll see.’

  Ali would promise himself that this time he wouldn’t ask his sister for anything. If she didn’t have the bag, he reasoned as they walked along the gravelled path that led to the dunes, he wouldn’t want anything from it. But even as he promised he felt defeated. His sister was right; something in the bag would undo him by the end of the day.

  The sun was overhead when the children scrambled over the stones that littered the lane. Ali stuck to the edges where the rocks were smoother on his bare feet, and kept his ears to the grass verge. Where the cicadas sang he knew he was safe from snakes. When the path became more sand than gravel, Hanife would take off her shoes. The place where this would happen would vary from day-to-day. Ali hopped with impatience as he anticipated the spot where she would decide there was too much sand to walk in shoes and slowly unbuckle the leather sandals. He didn’t understand why she wore shoes to the beach in the first place but there was little point in arguing since that would only delay their arrival more. If he ran ahead, Hanife would tell their father and Ali would be in trouble. It made no difference that they were the same age apart from five minutes and that was to her advantage; he had to wait for his sister.

  ‘Stop jumping about, Al. Go on, don’t wait for me.’

  He couldn’t say exactly why he found it so hard to be patient. If he thought about it at all he only got as far as the feeling of fizziness inside him that made him want to run to keep from exploding. At school, the teacher tied a scarf around his legs to stop him squirming about.

  ‘It’s symbolic,’ she said when Ali’s mother complained, ‘To remind him.’

  Ali thought symbols were written down, like hieroglyphics. He wouldn’t have minded if the teacher had drawn a picture of a scarf. In any case, Ali’s mother thought the teacher was wrong. When he asked why, she said because he was too clever for the class but Ali knew what she meant. It was hidden behind t
he words, like everything adults said.

  It was hard enough speaking three languages without having to guess what his parents were really saying when they talked. And now he and Hanife had turned nine, she was doing it too.

  ‘Go on, run to your friends.’

  He didn’t want to leave her alone. He liked being with her when they were at home, making mud pies in the yard or riding the donkey that lived in the field behind their house. He wished she was like she had been before the bag and shoes appeared; running alongside him. She was as fast as him then.

  ‘Please abla, come on. I’ll race you.’

  On the day Hanife sprinted away from him, Ali blamed her head start. He arrived on the beach seconds after her and they both fell into the deep drifts of sand on the far side of the dunes.

  ‘Keep up, Ali eşek.’ Hanife’s laugh came in gulps as she caught her breath. ‘Go donkey, go.’

  Dozens of boys and girls were already gathered along the broad crescent of translucent water they called kalos because it was good, especially in early summer before visitors arrived and they had the whole cove to themselves. Ali’s friends were visible on the shoreline, kicking a ball along the surf. He could see one boy, a scrawny, siska kid called Damon was trying to stop them. The ball was his.

  ‘It’s okay, eşek. Go and bother Damon.’ Hanife sat up and brushed the sand out of her hair. She looked suddenly far away, Ali thought, as though he couldn’t touch her however much he reached out.

  He pulled one of the börek from his pocket and tore it in half.

  Without looking at the pastry, Hanife took a white cotton handkerchief from her bag and handed it to her brother.

  ‘Clean it. It’s not supposed to be crunchy, Al.’

  Ali wiped at his food a few times and ate his half in three bites. It was gritty but he was used to eating sand. In summer his mouth was usually full of the stuff. He smiled at Hanife before swallowing.

  ‘Iğğ! You’re disgusting.’ Hanife pushed him away.

  He shrugged and ate the other half as he stood up. Down by the water his friends were calling and waving at him. He turned back to his sister.

  ‘I’ll be over there with Celena.’ Hanife pushed her chin at the other side of the cove. ‘See you later.’