White Light (2 page)

Their obvious wealth, spawned from my father-in-law's job in the City, helped them maintain an annoying bemusement as I continued my research from PhD to post-doc and into a junior research fellowship at Oxford University.

‘Still at that microscope?’ Richard would quip, handing me the glass of Christmas or Easter or Bank Holiday cheer. I’d just smile, biting back the reply that I was a bloody physicist for God's sake. As for his daughter’s occupation as a fundraiser in a local charity, well that didn’t rate at all on the Richard Holland scale of success.

‘All that education,’ he’d sigh, as if he had had to scrimp to pay for it.

As I'd got older and that bloom of innocence had worn away, I'd been tempted many a time to tell my father-in-law to shut the fuck up. Sarah had been surprisingly upset at the thought of us falling out, though, no matter how much he'd belittled, or snarked, or been just rude to her, and overall I'd tried not to upset her any further by 'beating my chest', as she'd described it.

The closest I'd ever got was last summer when we'd been forced to attend the Holland's annual barbeque, eating charred sausages amongst their well-heeled North Oxford neighbours. Sarah was looking stunning in a strappy summer dress, and we were laughing with an elderly couple about some nonsense in the news when Richard had come striding into the group and cut her out of it, pulling her away to one side and delivering a tirade in a low voice that I couldn't hear from across the lawn. Conversation faltered around me, as we all watched this scene for a second, then I stepped across and put my arm around her, shocked to find her actually trembling.

'What's the problem, Richard?' His face, I saw, was purple with fury. A dispassionate part of my brain wondered what the hell had happened, but most of me was filling with an empowering rage. My father-in-law turned his head and glared at me.

'Why did you let her come to our party dressed like that?' I blinked. 'Get her to cover herself, she looks like a fucking slut.'

The garden, the evening, even Sarah, seemed to fall away as I stepped forward and pushed Sarah's father in the middle of the chest, throwing him two paces back. He stared at me, as if he couldn't believe I'd done it, and I moved towards him with my fists clenching. Then Sarah was pulling my arm, and saying something through tears about wanting to go home, let's just go home, and I allowed myself to be towed away, through the now-silent guests, and we drove off, Sarah sobbing and inconsolable, clutching her arms around herself as if she were nude, and not able to hear me trying to tell her how beautiful she was and how much I loved her.

Remembering all this made me want to scream.  The short spring day was fading, and a cold breeze was lifting from the shadows. I shivered, and glanced at the house which stared back at me with its darkened windows. At a run, I crashed back into the kitchen and pelted through the building turning on the lights.  When every light was burning I flung myself down in a kitchen chair and rested my head on the table.

Sarah and I hadn’t had more than a night or two apart in years. Ironically, I'd been away on one of those rare overnight stays when she'd died: presenting a paper at a conference in the Netherlands. It had seemed such a big deal at the time - now it looked like what it was, an ego trip, a pathetic waste of human activity. It had meant I hadn't been there when she'd needed me. Maybe I could have gone and collected her, then she wouldn't have been driving...

I sat up and slammed the tumbler across the room and into the sink, where it smashed with a satisfying explosion of glass and dirty crockery. The empty bottle of whisky followed, triggering a cull of the available breakables, and I was dimly aware of the cat screeching off upstairs in alarm. The crashing and the destruction felt good, and I lurched into the hall looking for other things to smash. Pictures, books, CDs, I don’t know what else, everything was swept onto the floor and kicked and dropped and I screamed and yelled at the top of my voice.

After a while I was exhausted and hoarse and I slumped onto the floor in the centre of the wreckage. It wasn’t enough, this destruction, it wasn’t enough to make up for losing my Sarah. It had been my fault. I hadn't been there to protect her.

And it was then that I thought of the gun.

It was a Luger P08 pistol and my Uncle Henry had ‘liberated’ it during the War. One long Cornish summer he had taught me to shoot with it, arranging windfalls along his garden wall for me to pick off. I had been a quick learner and I was a good shot, and when he’d died a few years ago I had collected the gun along with a suitcase-full of his things. My head went up as I thought with perfect clarity that it was still upstairs.

I don’t really remember going up to the box room at the top of the house, and only vaguely recall pushing aside my old motorcycle leathers and drawing out the suitcase from under the spare bed.  I threw it open and rummaged in the old coats and envelopes of photographs that I had collected from Uncle Henry’s house, and then my hand closed round the grip of the pistol. It was gleaming and black and heavy, same as I remembered. Further scrabbling brought out a box of bullets and I fumbled it open and loaded it, then snapped it shut.

My head was completely clear and I felt a wave of incredible relief. It was simple: I would drive to the place where Sarah died and then shoot myself. I didn't really believe that I would walk into the light and see her again, but I would be out of this pain, and that's all that mattered.

Down the stairs again, and then through the detritus of the hallway and kitchen to grab my car keys. I didn't think that I shouldn't drive, that I had just drunk a bottle of whisky and hadn't slept for two weeks.  I just thought about putting the gun barrel to my temple and pulling the trigger.

CHAPTER TWO

Thursday, 12 March 2015. 06:19

I woke up in the car, shivering in the pre-dawn cold, with the Luger leaning heavily on my ankle in the foot well.  I leaned down gingerly and retrieved the gun from the floor of the car. Thank God I hadn’t tried to fire it, I found myself thinking, it hadn’t been cleaned in years and would probably have exploded – but then, I had been planning to blow my brains out so it wouldn't really have mattered. I opened the door and threw up onto the gravel. 

I stood under the shower for about an hour, not really thinking at all.  Three neurofen and several glasses of water hadn’t really touched my hangover, and the thought of me actually setting out to drive, drunk, across the county with a loaded gun and then shoot myself just made me go cold and shake. What on earth had I been thinking?

But then, I knew exactly what I had been thinking and despite everything I was still thinking it.
I got out of the shower and opened another bottle of whisky.

I can’t really remember the following few weeks: it just seems a blur of drink and darkness. I think Dave came round a couple of times, bringing a takeaway and trying to tidy up a bit around me. The answering machine spat out brief messages from friends that, in my paranoia, I interpreted as relieved not to be actually speaking to me. One message from Maggie and then the answering machine followed most of the rest of my belongings into the bin.

I kept re-playing memories of Sarah in my mind, even though each one was a little thorn that hooked and worked itself into my pain, burrowing in further and further until the suffering became a hot white dot, a singularity of agony. Through the whisky haze I realised that many of these memories were in fact re-plays of the video messages my wife had been fond of making, their titles stepping-stones through our lives: Sarah with Fergus as a kitten, Sarah laughing about the heel coming off her shoe just before a job interview, Sarah crowing about a tiny shrivelled pepper she'd grown on the windowsill chilli plant, Sarah dancing around to her favourite Louis Armstrong tracks. Stupidly, idiotically, I'd stored these messages on an old laptop and forgotten to back them up, and one day the hard drive had failed and they were gone.

'It doesn't matter,' she said to me, trying to cajole me out of my self-induced sulk, 'there'll be plenty more where those came from.' But there wouldn't be, not any more. I squeezed my eyes tight shut against yet more pointless tears, and fumbled the screw cap on the whisky bottle.

Eventually the clouds broke just a little as I sat at the kitchen table at five a.m. one Tuesday morning, and I realised that I was either going to drink myself to death or I needed to go back to some approximation of normal life. I rubbed my raw eyes and my unshaven face, and realised that the huge blackness in my life had moved, just slightly, away from me so I could see it and not just be lost in it. 

I got up, peeled off my stinking clothes and shoved them in the washing machine, and then trudged exhaustedly up the stairs. I got the pistol and stowed it back into the old suitcase and under the spare bed, hoping I would be able to ignore its siren call of an easy way out.

Turning my back I rummaged my phone out of the crap in the bedroom and sent Dave a text:
back tomorrow

Thursday, 2 April 2015: 9.09

When I woke, my phone was ringing. I reached clumsily to pick it up from the floor and held it to
my ear.

'Adam?' the voice seemed vaguely familiar, then I realised: it was Darren, he must be calling about the investigation.

'Darren?' I sat up and tried to make my voice sound less sleepy. 'What's happening? Did you get the results back on the paint from the other car?'

'Er, no,' he was sounding hassled, embarrassed even, 'actually we're not looking into that angle any longer.'

'What? Why?'

'I've had – well, I've had a new directive that we are closing the investigation.' There was a silence. 'The coroner has ruled that your wife's death was misadventure, an accident, and we have to focus our resources on those cases where there is a realistic expectation of arrest and prosecution.'

I stood up, and covered my eyes with my free hand. 'So that's it? The other car? The bruise? The argument with her parents – they're all just dropped?'

'Yeah,' his voice was heavy, regretful. 'I am sorry about this, Adam. I wish I could do more.'

'Right, thanks,' I said, but he'd already hung up.

I was looking at the phone in my hand when it chirped to announce a new message.

It was Dave
:
You still coming?

I texted back: On way

I chucked some clothes on my back and headed out to the car. It was raining, and the narrow road was running with water, but I didn’t mind driving slowly – concentrating helped block out the thought of Sarah’s last journey.  Getting into Oxford was its usual nightmare and I crawled onto the ring road and then dragged through town and up South Parks Road.  Opposite the building site that would soon be the Biological Sciences building stood a bedraggled group of Animal Rights protesters waving soggy placards and shouting against the testing that would go on inside. I stared at them, wondering how they could care about something that wasn’t Sarah’s death, and drove on to the Cockcroft Physics Building, pulling into its small car park.

Although the building was a genuine 1970s monstrosity, it had been retro-fitted with all the trappings of modern post-terrorist paranoia, and I had to tap my key fob onto the polished steel reader beside the door before I could get in. Inside, a beech reception desk blocked the plain grey corridors which led off in several directions. Norman, the balding receptionist slash security guard slash porter, moved from his station and reached out to shake
my hand.

'Dr Kitchener, how are you, sir?' I couldn't answer, just nodded vaguely and tried to twist my face into what I remembered was a smile. He just nodded back, and with relief I dropped his hand and swiped myself through a set of turnstiles before jogging up a flight of stairs to my floor. It felt weird going back into the lab after a few weeks away. Ordinarily I go in every day, and often return multiple times during the evening and night to check on an experiment or just to sit and think. Now I was looking at everything as if I had been away for a hundred years, a Rip Van Winkle of grief and death.

‘Alright, Adam?’ Dave stuck his head out of his lab, now more recognisable in his familiar shock-shirt and battered jeans. ‘Made it, then.’

‘Yeah.’ I moved on quickly to the end lab, and shut the door on his well-meaning intrusion. I wasn’t in the mood for conversation. I wasn’t really in the mood for anything but I could go through the motions of living more easily at work. To be honest, I was scared of what I might do if I was at home.

My lab was a tiny, dingy box that until a few months before had been a storage room, but it was the first research space that was all mine and I loved it. I turned on the fluorescent light and moved automatically to feed my hamster, Terry, who blinked up at me with his tiny reddish eyes. This morning as on most other mornings I slumped into my chair and turned on the computer, then zipped across the room on castors to snap the kettle on. The knackered strip-light popped and flickered annoyingly, and Terry rattled nosily around his cage. I felt insulated from the world, and I liked it. If I concentrated hard, perhaps I could break out of the repetitive circle of my thoughts about Sarah. But should I do that? A wave of guilt took me over for a second, but I shook my head and turned to my computer to try and distract myself with what was going on in the lab.

For some years now I had been pursuing my own line of research, looking at quantum electrodynamics and heavy or transuranic elements.  Most of these elements have to be artificially created in the lab but one, element 122 (temporarily named unbibium), had recently been discovered in a naturally occurring thorium deposit by a team led by Amnon Marinov from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A mate of mine at Harvard had wangled my inclusion in the international team examining the properties of the new element, and before Sarah’s death I’d been running a set of experiments designed to establish its base-line reaction to magnetic fields. Nothing interesting had turned up so far.

The PC disgorged a load of departmental email that I scanned and then deleted. I was starting to review the results of some experiments that I had run just before I’d last left the lab when the door burst open. I twisted round on my old swivel chair and my heart sank to see Dr Bill Gilbert standing in the doorway. Our head of department is a tall man with iron-grey hair and a ‘devil take the hindmost’ attitude to management. At his heels, as usual, was Freddy Wright, sometime post doc and Gilbert's nephew, who seemed permanently attached to Uncle's coat-tails like a big, soft leech.

‘Morning, Adam,’ said my boss, striding energetically into the tiny room. Automatically I wheeled slightly backwards to give him some room.  ‘How are you?’

‘OK, thanks,’ I said, eyeing up Wright as he sauntered in with his hands in the pockets of his bright yellow posh-boy trousers.

A memory of Freddy, drunk and red in the face, chatting up my wife at the lab Christmas party shot into my mind. He'd been right in the middle of his usual 'I'm headed for greatness' speech when I'd spotted him, and Sarah's eyes had met mine in silent appeal as I strode across the Common Room to rescue her. She took a half step towards me, but Freddy didn't like his audience escaping, and had grabbed her wrist with a fleshy hand.

'Where are you going? I didn't say you could leave!'

He dropped his fake matey tones when he was pissed, reverting to the nasal tones of what he probably thought was the ruling elite. My voice in his ear, as I leaned over his shoulder and snapped my own hand over his and squeezed hard, had no such pretentions.

'Get your fucking hands off my wife, you shit,' His puffy face went pale under its unpleasant sheen of sweat, and he released Sarah's wrist. She stepped away to my side, rubbing her arm and I could tell she was both rattled and furious.

'Arsehole!' she said, then linked her arm through mine and we wove away through the rest of the drunken department, leaving Freddy behind.

I clicked back into the present moment just as Gilbert nodded, his ten-second interest in my wife’s death ticked off.  ‘Well, glad you’re back. Harvard have been hassling me about your results from the 122 trials.’  This annoyed me, I’d hardly had the bloody element a week before Sarah’s accident and the US team knew I had been on compassionate leave. More than likely Gilbert had promised his boss, the almost mythological Professor Ed Collins, that the results were amazing and already being written up for publication. He tended to over-egg results before they had actually been found and then hassle researchers to cover his arse for him.  Gilbert cocked an imperious eyebrow at me and went ‘Hmm?’

‘I’m working on it, Bill,’ I replied, trying not to sound as pissed-off as I felt, and also trying to ignore Freddy who was now leaning against the door with a badly-disguised grin on his face, clearly enjoying my discomfort. ‘In fact I was just reviewing the latest batch of experiments when you came in.’ I gestured at the screen which displayed a graph of various colours. ‘I’ve been testing the usual Tesla spectrum, but I’ve had some contamination of the sample from the thorium layers…’ 

Gilbert stooped over me to read the screen, leaning heavily on the back of my chair and making it creak.

‘Hmm’, he said again, not especially interested in anything I’d actually found. ‘Just hurry it up, Adam, we need those results pronto.’ He wheeled round, waved Wright into the corridor and slammed the door, leaving me scowling.

‘Fuck off!’ I said under my breath.

I turned back to the results, but I was too irritated by Bill bloody Gilbert and his parasitic nephew to pay them full attention. If he had been any kind of scientist he would realise that results can’t just be magicked up to suit his convenience. But then if he’d been any good at his lab bench he’d not have gone into management, I thought uncharitably.

After all of this I really wasn’t in the mood for work, so I fed Terry again. The hamster was very uncomplicated, and didn’t comment on me shovelling more rodent mix into his dish but instead started stowing it away in his cheek pouches against potential future famine. I stood and watched as he shuttled backwards and forwards from the bowl to the back of his cage where he thought I didn’t know he kept his secret stash of food. He was in fact the sixteenth hamster I’d had since I’d been an undergraduate – all of whom had been called Terry. There’s not much call for animal research in experimental quantum electrodynamics, but I liked to keep him nearby anyway, just in case I ever needed him. I expect the animal protestors down the road would happily club me over the head and liberate Terry, but he seemed quite contented to me. To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded being clubbed over the head either.

I sighed and slammed back into the chair and looked once again at the results on the computer, rubbing my temple which had begun to pound. Even this was crap and annoying: something weird was showing up at low-strength magnetic fields. It was almost like a moment where the readings had stopped entirely. Must be a blip.  It wouldn’t be surprising, my equipment had mostly been built by me over the years and was rather erratic. I fiddled around in the raw data for a while but couldn’t find any explanation other than a fault in the recording device, so gave it up and ran the whole set again using some equipment I wheedled from another researcher. I sat and watched it running for a couple of hours before I gave it up and went home.

I was stupidly nervous on the drive back to the village, worried that I would slip straight back into the bottle when I walked in the door, so as soon as I came in I concentrated on tidying up the destruction I had managed to wreak two weeks before, eventually lugging six bin bags of broken junk over to the dustbins. Outside, the sun had broken through the low clouds and I stopped for a second to watch the cat half-heartedly stalk a starling across the lawn. The bird flew off. 'Bad luck, mate,' I said to Fergus, who sat down and licked a paw as if he hadn't really been trying to catch it.

On a whim, I went back inside and whipped from room to room, snatching up all of Sarah’s things, and then all the things that reminded me of Sarah, before packing them away into big cardboard boxes.

As I grabbed the last handful of CDs something small clattered to the floor. I reached down and picked it up: it was an old audio tape.
Sarah's Mix Tape 1999
announced the slender strip of label.

God, I remembered this. It wasn't long after Sarah and I had got together at University when I'd decided to make her a retro compilation of songs that we'd danced to, or that I liked, or that frankly I thought would make me look cool. I'd had to borrow a crappy old boombox from someone down the corridor, but eventually I'd produced this.

In the intervening years the paper cover had been lost and I couldn't remember what was on it now. I hadn't known she'd kept it all this time. My throat closed and I flicked the tape onto my desk, before grabbing a big pile of post that my wife must have opened whilst I was away and shoved it into the
last box.

The house looked quite bare with all her stuff gone. When the boxes were full I jammed them into our bedroom, stacking them systematically between the bed and the door. I removed my clothes and stuff and stripped the bed – I wasn’t going to be using this room anytime soon. Finally I pulled the door shut and stepped across the landing to the tiny spare room that I now set up as my temporary sleeping quarters: a single bed, narrow wardrobe, old TV balanced on a knackered dining chair. If I tried hard enough it reminded me of some of the rooms I’d had in Halls as a student. Fergus had already settled himself comfortably on the duvet, and I tickled him under the ear before throwing him off and lying down myself. It was early yet, but another bottle from our whisky store was keeping me company.