Addition (7 page)

‘Close. It said “I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man.” Nikola was only twenty-eight then.’

‘That’s not young.’

‘I’ll let that slide, considering I used to travel to school by brontosaurus.’

She chuckles. ‘Your turn.’

‘Edison ripped Nikola off,’ I say. ‘Promised him a fifty thousand dollar bonus if he could redesign Edison’s generators to run better. Nikola worked his guts out, barely sleeping for months.’

‘Poor Nikola, but he was a bit of a sucker. Daddy says always get it in writing.’

That’s because Daddy would rob you blind himself given half a chance.

‘He was trusting. Instead of the money, Edison offered to pay him twenty-eight dollars a week.’

‘A week? I don’t remember this bit. That’s nothing. He must have been really pissed off.’

‘He was,’ I say.

‘So Nikola told him to shove it?’

‘Nikola told him to shove it,’ I say. ‘And then he met Westinghouse.’

‘He was an inventor too, right?’

‘Yep. When he was twenty, Westinghouse was nearly in a train crash. All the trains had dodgy brakes back then. He invented air brakes and made a squillion. Westinghouse already owned his own electricity company. He was a good guy. He was the first boss to give his workers a half day off on Saturdays.’

‘How did Nikola know they were going to be best friends?’

‘Gut feel, I guess. They couldn’t have been more different, but they liked each other straight away. Nikola was the shy, dark foreigner. Westinghouse was big and blunt with a huge coiffed moustache, always cheerful. Sometimes you’ve got to take the plunge, Larry. Sometimes if you open up, if you take the risk you can achieve more, learn more, feel more with someone else. Someone you can trust, someone you can expose your heart to. Some partnerships can achieve wonderful things.’

‘Like me and Courtney.’

‘Yes. Yes, just like you and Courtney.’

After I hang up I go down to the park and lie on the cricket pitch, staring up. The cement of the pitch is cool under my back. The stars are hanging right above my face. I can hear cicadas in the bushes at the side. From the noise there could be 100 of them, or 120. But there could be 2 or 3. I’ll never know. How can you count what you can’t see? The smell of grass and leather drifts over the oval. I’d like to stay out here all night in the quiet, but I start getting ready for bed at 9.30 p.m. and it’s already 17 past 8.

Seamus Joseph O’Reilly is 38. 3 years older than I am. George Westinghouse was 42, 10 years older than Nikola.

It’s been years since I tried to count the stars. I spent a lot of long teenage nights staring up there trying to count them. I needed to know their number. I remember waiting until the whole house was quiet, until my parents’ soft voices in the room next to mine had stopped. I remember sneaking out the window in my nightie, no slippers on my feet, and lying down in the middle of the lawn. It was cold but I didn’t care. I would stare at the sky, but the fucking things move. I tried to imagine the sky as a grid, drawing lines from objects on the ground. I tried scanning it with an aluminium-foil tube. I tried everything. Nothing works.

My favourite part in the Bible is right at the beginning, in Genesis.
And God took Abraham outside and told him to look up at the stars
and count them if he could and this would be the number of his descendants.
There is a lot of counting in the Bible. Neither Mother nor Jill would realise this; they don’t know much about the Bible despite, or perhaps because of, all the time they spend in church. After all, in Leviticus it says it’s against the law of God to wear clothes woven from two types of material and Mother is a linen-blend kind of girl. And Exodus prohibits the charging of interest on a loan which would be news to the pious Harry, who believes that tax deductions are God’s gift to slum-lords.

Why did I say yes to that Irish git? I’m due to wear a dusty pink skirt with black piping around the edges. And black wedgy heels. And a plain black T-shirt. Too girly. I might as well have ‘gagging for it’ printed on the front. I’d rather wear jeans, and, say, a peasant top. But jeans are for winter. And although I do have a short-sleeved peasant top that fits into the spring/summer wardrobe, I had to wear it yesterday so it’s not due to be worn again for another 4-9 days.

My last date was 2 years 6 months ago with that idiot Simon, some friend of Harry’s. Jill organised it. I thought Jill said he was a Swiss baker. Interesting, I thought. Loaves with 17 different kinds of seeds. Intricate little pastries filled with chocolate. Secret recipes passed through generations of yodelling fathers and sons. All night I worried about how he would get to work by 3 a.m. to start the yeast fermenting if he kept drinking like that. By the time I realised he was a Swiss banker I was so bored I had almost lost the will to live.

But this time will be different. I’ll order an entrée and one drink and then go home. To show myself I can—I can change routine if I want to. It’s only that most of the time I choose not to. Luckily he suggested a place in High Street so I can walk there and walk home. We’re meeting at 7.00 p.m., so if I leave at 9.05 p.m. I’ll still be able to be home and start getting ready for bed on the stroke of 9.30. I can leave home at 6.40 p.m., so, counting backwards: 5 minutes to put stuff in my small bag, 5 minutes to dress, 5 minutes to put on a bit of lippy and some mascara. 5 minutes to do my hair, 5-minute shower, 5 minutes for teeth, including brushing and flossing. Start getting ready at 6.10.

The cement is chilling right inside my spine now, and the bones of my hips are tender where they touch the ground. I know it’s time to head for home. The aura of exuberance, the energy remaining from boys batting and bowling has gone. The stars are winking but they seem very faint tonight. Light pollution from all these houses, little boxes on the hillside. I’m wasting my time even trying to count the stars because only God can do that. It says in Psalms that He decides the number of the stars. And He knows all of them by name.

When I get home from the park, despite following my normal nightly routine, I can’t sleep. I lie on my bed and stare at Nikola’s photo. It’s not really fair to be going out without him. I’m sure he wouldn’t like it. Serbians are passionate by nature—look at how upset he was when Marconi stole his patent for radio. He controlled his anger of course, and never said a bad word about anyone, but you could tell.

It’s only dinner, though. It’s not like I’m doing anything wrong. I remember reading somewhere that the key element of being unfaithful was secrecy. I’ve told him all about Seamus. This dinner’s a little test for me, like an experiment. He’s a scientist—he’d understand that. I’ve been feeling so much better lately and soon I’ll be going back to work. And when I go back to work I’ll have conversations with parents and eat with colleagues in the staffroom. That’s the thing about teaching—no matter how organised you are, how many systems you put in place, you can’t plan for people. They interrupt you. They’re early. They’re late. They can’t get it together.

This is a trial run. Nikola would understand that.

It’s Friday. 12 degrees. I don’t think I can go. I’d like to. But I can’t. It’s already 6.02 p.m. and I have to start getting ready in 8 minutes. I’m lying on my bed, waiting for the clock to tell me it’s 6.10. The trouble is my teeth ache. Mine are not sweet curvy milk teeth. My teeth are sharp with pointy canines that make me seem violent or unhinged. I’m not sure which tooth is aching. Perhaps it’s not a tooth. Perhaps the ache is further inside my jaw or in my temporo-mandibular joint. This makes more sense. I’ve looked and looked at my teeth in front of the bathroom mirror and I can’t see any holes or blackening. I’m meticulous about brushing. And flossing. It probably is in the joint because my jaw is opening stiffly with a popping sensation. I’ve read about this. It’s some kind of flaw in the tendon. I can’t keep my tongue still, that’s the problem. I can’t keep my tongue away from each plane of each surface of each of my 24 teeth or from under the ridge below my teeth or from the back of my soft palate.

I can go. I can. It’s time to start getting ready. My jaw will be okay for a few hours. The first thing I need to do is brush and floss. I’m in the bathroom standing at the sink. My tongue doesn’t know how to rest. Where to rest. Where does it normally sit? It doesn’t lie on the bottom, flaccid. How does the saliva drain? Do I really swallow so much, all the time? Is it always so loud? Why would I be making all this saliva? The saliva streams like a black river down my throat, a dark stringing flood. If I lean forward it will fall to the floor and curl around my foot and swell in the space between my toes. My soles are wet. If this keeps up I’ll drown in my sleep. Why does my mouth feel so foreign?

Oh God.

The only possible reason could be that there’s something foreign there. Because the seed of a tumour is growing, throwing my mouth out of balance.

I once read about a man who had a tumour on his jaw the size of an orange. It’s starting here, on my jaw, like a biblical judgment. Like I’ve been speaking ill of people. Which I have, but only because they deserve it. And now I have to take my punishment, suffer it, walk the streets and look into people’s faces knowing I’m dying and yet they still think everything’s normal. Or the surgeons will operate and take out half my jaw bone and I won’t be pretty anymore. I’ll be ugly. No one will care if I live or die. I can feel the pulse beating in my jaw now. Probably taking secondaries to my lungs or my liver or my bones.

That’s it. I’m going to bed. He’ll get over it; it’s not the bloody school formal. I’m not meeting his parents. He’ll have a quiet dinner and go home. He doesn’t have my number. I’m going to bed early and going to bed early is allowed under special circumstances, one of which is dying.

Bedtime routine begins. I pick up my toothbrush, and then I see them. No wonder. No wonder I have a tumour. I’ve been blind. I’ve been stupid.

My toothbrush is clear stiff acrylic with a softer purple rubber near the handle. The head has white and lilac nylon bristles tufting out of small holes. But how many holes? And how many bristles?

How could I not know this number? How could I never have thought to check? All those mornings. All those nights. I feel my teeth throb in time with my pulse and I remember that a pain in the jaw is sometimes the first sign of a heart attack.

15 tufts around the edge of the head. White. Down the middle are 6 rows of lilac tufts, the same height as those around the edge, interspersed with 4 rows of shorter white tufts. I sit down on the bathroom floor, shaking. My fingers are too fat to separate the bristles into individual strands. It’s taking so long. Over and over I have to begin again.

34. The first tuft has 34 bristles. Strangely, so does the second.

By the time I’m about halfway through it starts getting really difficult. I realise this is because it’s dark outside and I no longer have enough light to count by. Carefully, using my fingers to separate the current tuft into counted and uncounted bristles, I stretch my other arm up and hit the light.

By the time I finally raise my head, by the time all 1768 bristles are counted and double-checked and triple-checked, my shoulders are heavy and my neck is stiff. The night is quite still.

I am quite still.

The clock tells me it is 9.24 p.m. In the restaurant, they’ll be handing round the dessert menus. In my flat, it’s almost time to get ready for bed. So I sit at the edge of the bath for 6 minutes and wait.

At 9.30 I stand at the sink. This time as I hold my toothbrush in my hand, I’m sure. I know how many strands of nylon brush each tooth. I can picture them. My jaw is safe. My teeth are safe.

Then I look at my toothbrush. I buy a new toothbrush on the first of every month but this one doesn’t look new any more. It’s stretched and dog-eared. The bristles bend back at horrible angles, after being rifled over and over, jammed by my fingers. It looks like a toilet brush.

I can’t put this in my mouth.

I can’t go to sleep without brushing my teeth.

I must start getting ready for bed at 9.30 p.m. and it’s already 9.30 p.m.

I must buy a toothbrush on the first of the month and it’s not the first of the month.

I force a deep breath in, then out.

I now know that there are 1768 bristles and I doubt there’s another person alive outside of a toothbrush factory who knows that. This is what will happen. As it’s a Friday night, not a school night, I will start getting ready for bed at 10.30 p.m. instead of 9.30. I will do this in future on all Friday and Saturday nights. Even though there are 7 days until the first of the month, I will buy 2 new toothbrushes—1 until the end of the month and 1 to start next month with. This mid-month change in toothbrushes will only occur when I count the bristles. In fact I’ll walk to the supermarket now and buy as many toothbrushes of this kind as I can because if they discontinue this model and introduce a new model I’ll have to count the bristles all over again.

I don’t need my usual leaving the house ritual because this isn’t a shopping trip—this is an extension of my new ritual for the night I run out of toothbrushes, so I can simply grab my keys and purse and walk. I go in what I’m wearing: grey tracksuit pants many sizes too big that belong in my drawer labelled, ‘comfy’. (The label is on the inside of the drawer.) Sneakers, dark blue. Big sweatshirt, navy, also comfy. T-shirt. Black. Hair pulled back in a pony tail. No makeup.