I Know What I Saw

I skirt around the Elephant and Castle and take a seat on a bus – the driver turns a blind eye. There are no more than a few passengers, each of them in his own pocket of life, misery or joy. My left eye is still misty but is now beginning to burn. I press it gently against the cold window to soothe it and see that the rain which had let up has started again.

I don’t have a clear idea of where I’m going and begin to drift in and out of sleep. Then as the bus shudders over some pothole, I’m jolted from sleep into another oblivion and I remember the house again and that a woman was killed. And that I was there.

The night spins around me. This pain, this rain, the tiredness. A swell of nausea builds and makes me retch. I have to find somewhere soon. Just to rest. I press the bell again and again for the driver to stop but he drives on. ‘Just let me off,’ I shout. He glances in a mirror and finally he opens the door.

I find a doorway on the street and lean my weight against it. The space between action and inaction stalls my thoughts. I can see her face in front of me, frozen as it was then. Still. If I had acted she might be alive and yet I wonder if I would have been. Or him, if he would have been.

There is a drip from the ceiling of my tiny patch of shelter that lands in maddening spots on my knee. I separate my legs to make room for it but then it taps on the tile. The rhythm begins to soothe me and I fall into a kind of trance. Sleep paws until I am asleep.

6 Wednesday

One Friday each month, Dad, who was a physicist, would sit us around a table and set us a random topic of discussion. He’d listen and occasionally mediate, and then at the end he’d hand out a prize for the best ideas. Answers, he told us, weren’t important. To think, that was the important thing. The prizes weren’t particularly exciting by today’s standards – an Airfix model airplane once, a small electric motor and some circuits another time. Once there was a skateboard – that was misjudged. But the prizes, like all prizes, were icons – declarations of superiority.

Of the two of us, Rory was the genius. I was the impressionist – a fake. He had the beautiful brain. I had the right arrangement in my head, but it didn’t produce the same music. And Dad, though he loved us both, loved perfection and purity most of all. He loved maths. When he saw numerical puzzles, he somehow saw the Universe in a way that I couldn’t – but Rory could. Rory was a pure mind. But he was younger than me, so for a while I could mask the symptoms of his genius. I remember how urgent it was that I hold him back to give myself a chance of winning something. Maybe just love.

The Fermi paradox: that was the one, now I think back, that changed everything. You’ll know the one, Fermi, a physicist, asked about extraterrestrial life: If there are so many trillions of planets in the observable universe and billions of Earth-like planets among them, where are all the people? And why haven’t we heard from them?

When he set the discussion, Dad played at being the casual benign professor, as if the questions spontaneously occurred to him. But I’d known for some time that they came from the back of a monthly physics magazine. So I occasionally went to the local library when the new issue came out and had a quick preview. And one day there it was: Fermi. Rory loved space and astrophysics and there was no way of beating him without a head start. So, I cheated. For a week I read everything I could on the subject at the school library, and even spoke to the physics teacher after lessons.

The day of the test came and I remember Rory had been up in his room doing some computer programing. I had had to call him twice, to get him to come down.

‘So,’ Dad said when Rory floated in. ‘Where are all the aliens?’ He held up the prize. A lock knife with a dark, polished wood handle. I salivated as Rory rubbed his chin, oblivious.

Though there are plenty of Earth-like planets – enough to guarantee that there’s intelligent life out there – the Universe is so vast that the likelihood of finding them is vanishingly small. Aliens living, say, only ten million light years away would need to travel at the speed of light for ten million years before they reached us. Which means they’d have to leave their home planets before humans came into existence. And then head over to us on a huge cosmic gamble.

‘But what if they mastered interstellar travel?’ Rory asked.

I smiled.

‘Not possible,’ I said. ‘The amount of energy, even if somehow there was a way around the limits on the speed of light, you would need – would be – well – astronomical.’

‘But an advanced civilisation, with technology expanding in accordance with Moore’s Law, could tap the energy.’

‘What?’ I sneered. ‘Fusion?’