Silver Screen Page 2

  He didn't reply, but kept playing, jabbing the invisible gun control, curving the plane around in a spiral with his other hand. Jane turned her head and looked at the wall. “You haven't got enough fuel to get out of the labyrinth,” she said in a deadpan voice, “so you might as well quit now.”

  He kept on playing.

  “Hello?” Jane said in disgust. “I said you haven't—”

  “I heard you,” he said. “But isn't it beautiful? The doomed flight to certain death?” The maze in which he was flying curled around his wings smoothly.

  Jane snorted her opinion.

  Roy turned the machine into a slow spiral around its short axis and let go of it. We all watched as it slammed into the wall and exploded in a brilliant burst of blue and white. Play Again? the screen asked, typing the question over the scorchmark. Instant resurrection.

  “Want a go?” He stripped the gloves off and held them out to me.

  “No. No thanks,” I said quickly, terrified in case they were going to make me play it and I would show myself up.

  “Well, I will,” he said and put them back on.

  Jane made a noise of irritation and, finding nothing else to do, walked out, not even awarding me a second look.

  Things stayed pretty much the same all through school. Jane alternated between slightly puzzled efforts to become friendly and bleak periods of excessive introversion, the timing of which was erratic and unpredictable and unchanged by puberty or adulthood. Roy was the other beat of the pulsar. Manic and frequently disruptive in classes, they eventually gave him private tuition in separate rooms. In private he remained closeted, but in a different way from Jane. Roy was mostly alone because he was sufficient to himself. He was happy to see me, and if we didn't quite have a conventional friendship then we had something like it, so close you couldn't make the call. Somewhere in the wider world kids in their teens loitered in shop doorways late at night, smoked a pooled ten gaspers and crammed their mouths with pay-by-weight sweets. They engaged in friendly bouts of scuffling and sat on damp curbs and felt estranged. We sat in the dorm and talked big technology. The feelings were much the same, deep and loyal and illogical, and absolutely and utterly beyond any kind of comment.

  That was one of the beginnings.

  Life there was regimented up to a point. Each of us had a room with sink and mirror, a wardrobe, a bed, and a workstation. Lucky ones got a little window, which might look out east towards the farmhouse or west onto the playing fields overgrown with couch grass and dandelions, where seldom a ball was kicked except to prove some point about vectors or gravity. There was a swimming pool shaped like the joined kidneys of Siamese twins to the rear of the farmhouse and there was a cinder running track of distinctly unambitious proportions alongside a tangled apple orchard. We were made to go out for exercise each day for half an hour, but this was the one place where only token effort was ever required by the staff. However, competition among some kids was so relentlessly fierce that it couldn't rest for a moment, and a large contingent of the school was—as well as being studious and clever—fighting fit. On the announcement boards outside my room there was a constantly updated list of the best mile times, to thousandths of a second. The bottom of the list was somewhere in the eight-minute league. I had the time, but Anjuli O'Connell, my name, did not appear on it at all. Ever. Only Jane sometimes deigned to carve out the odd six-minuter as part of the regular assertion of her natural superiority.

  The reason my name never appeared on the mile board and the reason I had been estranged at my first school, and needed someone so badly at this one, were one and the same. All of Berwick competed in the skills of intelligence and memory from the day they arrived to long after they had left. Most were entirely driven by the anxious frustration of bubbling away in the top half of one or other of these scales, rising and falling like gases boiling out of a liquid.

  But on one of those scales my name was permanently at the top, as untouchable as the divine—because some errant gift of the Almighty had cursed me with a perfect memory.

  Memory comes in different ways, labelled according to its primary trigger: kinaesthetic, the memory of the body and its movements; eidetic, the perfect recall of spoken words, of actions; photographic, the retention of what is seen as it was seen; olfactory, the instant recognition of a particular smell which brings with it emotion, the flavour of a moment, a symbolic picture, a complex meaning often elusive to an ordinary mnemonic. Not to me; I have all those memories. I remember everything without effort and recall it at will. You'd never see me gnawing a pencil or twirling my hair as I pored over some exam question, trying to suck that final dreg of understanding from it that would clue me in to the answer. And there lies my weakness, ever indulged to ruinous proportions: I can remember it all, but I don't need to understand it. The ability to paraphrase has many times proved invaluable. I'd simply recall a text or two, or a teacher's recitation, and arrange it in some different words and be pronounced clever. The technique was so immediately successful and produced such a worthwhile envy in others that it was impossible to explain, even to the most sympathetic supervisor, that such an ability filled me with terror.

  As I told Roy Croft late one night, it's like being a kind of conduit. The messages pass through me, the information perfect, yet all undifferentiated so that everything seems of equal importance, nothing stands out. Questions and answers come and go, accurately responded to, as if someone else inhabited my head, someone much smarter, who knew the answers and told them to me. I never knew how things worked. I could do high-level math with ease, simply by following the rules, but I couldn't attach any meaning to the equations or feel their relationship to the real world. I was a human file server. As I said this aloud one day, fat and wretched on the edge of his bunk, Roy frowned and became uncharacteristically still with the effort of imagining the situation.

  “I see everything,” he said. “I see it and I feel it. I know it as a surface or an object or a movement. I can do it as numbers or just shapes. It's like reading music. I hear the tune of the equation as soon as I look at it. I always know how the pieces fit together, and how they don't.”

  “I only know that they don't, but I couldn't prove it or say why, only that I've heard the teacher say why. I couldn't think of a thing on my own.” I twisted the corner of the bedsheet, feeling slightly unwelcome but too miserable to leave. “Can't you show me how? How does it mean anything?”

  But he couldn't, and I couldn't say what I meant by mean anyway. I thought that understanding was like a lightbulb in people's heads, which came on with every new idea and remained forever sure, a beacon in the darkness. My head was lit by candles which the faintest breeze of doubt extinguished.

  Jane was of even less help. Thin and pale and exuding hostility, like a triffid's etiolated shoot, she swung her foot back and forth and stared at her workstation. “Why does it matter?” she said directly when I had tried to explain. She didn't look at me, just talked to the screen. “If you can do the work without mistakes and you have the answers, surely you must be able to put the question and the answer together. So why do you want anything else? What the hell else is there?”

  “But I can't,” I said. “I don't even know what the question means. Why is it asked? Why is it important? How did whoever figured it out figure it out? What put them onto it? I can't apply this stuff.”

  “Just don't worry about it.” She sounded dismissive, already more interested in her work than talking to me. I felt shamed and resentful and that was the last time I went into her room, or talked to her except in passing. It never occurred to me then that she might be frightened by what I said, or envious.

  Left alone with my fear I soon became lethargic and sullen, and it was shortly afterwards that I threw myself into a new and more rewarding relationship with something I did fully understand. Food. That was another factor adding to my absence on the mile board. Over time I became quite the gastronaut and a terrorizer of the kitchens. In my spare time I m
emorized cookbooks, compared recipes, made fifteen different versions of mashed potato one night when I couldn't sleep—and ate them all one by one, bloated like a giant, tearful pumpkin.

  I had good days, too. My walls were decorated with beautifully arranged shots of raw ingredients, all labelled. There were chillies and leaves on the ceiling, fruit above the basin, fish on the window wall, meats above the cupboard, every kind of potato beside the bed. My atomizer gave off the scent of pecan pie. In my pockets small silver packages of chocolate nestled safely in case of emergency. There were many emergencies. A counsellor once came to see me about what she called “your embryonic weight problem,” but she ended up eating a whole bar of Swiss 70% and pumping me for information on the Crofts. I was glad to give her what she wanted, having successfully diverted all attention from myself.

  “You're one of their best friends,” she said at first, obviously hoping it to be true.

  I didn't want to disappoint her so early on. I said yes. Perhaps it was true, I wasn't sure. Did friends have to talk all the time or share things? If not, such a thing was possible.

  “We're very worried about Jane.”

  “Oh,” I said, licking my finger and dabbing up slivers of chocolate from the empty foil.

  “She has said she won't go home for the holidays. Has she mentioned this to you?”

  “No.” I was dopey with sugar, feeling slightly sick. I imagined myself in Jane's position, sending this message to my mother, and what a ferocious row would ensue. She would cry and exclaim and talk a mile a minute and eventually I'd agree to what she wanted. Jane's daring impressed me, but I felt a twinge of anxiety. “They never talk about home.”

  “And do you—to them, I mean?” she pleaded.

  “No,” I had to say. It had never occurred to me. I thought she was being stupid not to recognize that none of us talked about home. Home was full of possible defects and weaknesses, information that would be used against you. Home was also too ordinary to be worth a conversation. Only juniors who missed their mothers sniffled about it now and again in little huddles at the far edge of the orchard.

  “Oh.” She put her last piece of chocolate into her mouth. I seemed to be paying a high price for her so-called help. I should have given her something cheaper, with more cocoa butter in it. Or not. She could lose a few pounds herself: she was built like a big Welsh pony. “We wondered if there were any…troubles. Are the parents putting a lot of pressure on them? Well, parent. Their mother died some time ago of Hodgkin's, and I think the father is having some trouble of his own. Religious, you know. Setting up some kind of order out in the wilds. Christian, I believe. One of the sillier sects of that faith…”

  I shook my head and vowed never to confide in this woman.

  After a time of fruitless prying, she made a note about my diet and went away. “You might try more exercise,” she said as a parting shot, a guilty afterthought. I exercised my fingers at her back when she had gone.

  Jane did stay at school that summer, and Roy stayed with her. As far as I know, neither of them ever went home again. But it was not something I dwelt on. In a short space of time I had forgotten about it. I had my own problems.

  The following term began with exam results and a private visit to the school's newly appointed psychotherapist. My marks were high, as usual. In math, geography, history, classics, and the sciences I was top of the year. In English I was second best. So, too, in programming, engineering, and environmental studies. Art was counted as a leisure pursuit for science students and was fortunately not examined. When, this time, the results were announced to me in class I did not however display my usual meek acceptance.

  A strange feeling came over me as Miss Thelthorp, our class head, slotted my answer disk into my desk. Her dark hand with its pretty manicure was gentle, almost reverent, as she pressed her fingertips down and clipped it into the driver. At once the desk's small screen popped up behind the pencil tray and began to display my work, neatly marked with red ticks, its value scrolling like an inverse national debt in a column at the right. Ever on into the black, numbers clicking in the strange stock exchange in which our minds were future trades. Up and up. Anjuli, said the numbers as they rose, look how much you have fooled them with your worthless options. Are you worth this much, this much…or THIS much? And finally there was the mark: two plump nines for math. It even beat Roy and Jane into second place with their paltry ninety-eight and ninety-six. (This was before we started modular functions I hasten to add. I would never have beaten them then.) I stared at the numbers. A glance round the classroom confirmed the usual: resentment was in the faces of my peers. Roy looked rueful. Jane scowled like a malevolent gargoyle. Twenty other looks were either envy, disappointment, or resignation. All for nothing. For something I hadn't even done. Again.

  Slowly, a coldness crept up my arms and animated them. I shut the screen down and popped the disk into my hand. Around me the other children were looking at their answers, sighing or making noises of irritation at their mistakes. A miserable rage welled up inside me. I stood up. My chair scraped backwards, and the grating noise made Miss Thelthorp turn. Her startled face told me I must've looked bad. Her mouth opened slightly and her eyes widened in a moment's unjudged fear.

  “This is not me!” I shouted at her, shaking the disk. “I didn't do this! It isn't fair! It doesn't mean anything!” I felt suddenly very silly. I didn't know what I meant, only that it felt true.

  There was a stunned silence. Every face was turned to look at me.

  I wrestled with the hard plastic of the disk for a moment and then, unable to break it, flung it like a frisbee at Miss Thelthorp's head. She ducked so violently that she lost her balance. The disk clattered feebly against the window behind her, as if trying to escape. Then it tumbled to the floor, where the rest of the class results were lying, thrown from her hands as she had broken her fall. So it was that I was sent immediately to Dr. Singh.

  Dr. Singh was in her fifties. She wore blue jeans and white shirts to work, and put her feet up on the coffee table whether they had shoes on or not. Her hair was greyed to white and pinned up in a fat bun which made her head look like a cottage loaf. She greeted me warmly and offered me coffee and a jam doughnut. When I said no thanks, she ate it herself. I watched her in an appalled and pleased silence as she dusted the sugar carelessly onto the sofa next to her and smiled. “Well,” she said, “at last.”

  I looked at her. She did not seem to be making fun. Her hazel eyes gleamed without hidden depth. Still, I was not sure whether she was referring to my refusal of the doughnut or my outburst in class. I said nothing.

  “Come on,” she said, “don't say that's all there was. I've heard a lot about your complaints in the staffroom,” and she winked, still smiling.

  “They don't listen,” I said. “They don't believe me when I tell them that I don't understand.”

  “What don't you understand?”

  We sipped our coffee. “I don't understand how things work. I don't know why numbers add up the way they do. I don't see how combining two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen makes water. They're gases. I know things like that. I don't know why.”

  Dr. Singh nodded. “What would it be like if you did know why? What difference would that make?”

  Her question stopped me cold. I had never thought of this and immediately felt a blush of embarrassment. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what that must be like. Everyone else, even if they didn't remember perfectly, seemed to have no trouble with why. I imagined being Jane Croft, confident at her terminal. “Then I'd have control. I'd know,” I said. “I'd know what I was thinking and doing was right.”

  A piercing sadness at my lack of this insight cut me to the core and I blinked rapidly to try and hide the tears that were forming in my eyes. I longed for the vanished doughnut, sweet and real and solid in my mouth.

  “And how would that feel?” asked Dr. Singh gently. I looked into her face and saw compassion. It was more than I could
stand.

  “Safe!” I cried, shocked at the gush of words that came out, lanced, from my heart. “Powerful. Untouchable. People would like me, then. I'd know what to say and do. I'd know how to make them like me, and if they didn't then I wouldn't care and they'd be sorry in the end! I could say something that would change their minds and they'd know I was right!”

  Salty water filled my mouth and I buried my face in my hands. I was crying so hard I couldn't talk any more. Deep inside a small bit of me was very surprised that I was this miserable. I had thought I was only averagely miserable. Then it occurred to me that maybe I was just averagely miserable and, considering that everyone felt this way and of what a wet lettuce I was being in comparison to their bravery, I cried even harder.

  Dr. Singh waited patiently and gave me a handkerchief. It was soft and smelled of lavender. Later I found out she had a drawerful of these, layered with dried flowers in her desk, but I didn't know it then and it seemed especially kind. I dried my face.

  “What do you want to do about it?” she asked me when I had regained control of myself.

  “I can't do anything,” I ventured, thinking this was obvious.

  “But if you could, what would you do?”

  I thought for a while, staring out of her window at the weedy running track where a long-shanked cocoa-coloured boy from the year below was pattering around and around, all elbows and knees and determination. Through the slight drizzle his face looked dreamy and contented, focused on its simple purpose. “I'd give up all those classes and never study them again,” I said. “I'd only want to work on things that don't already have all the facts. Something with no facts, only theories that you have to think about but you can't know. Where I won't be able to cheat. Where I can be in the same boat as everyone else.”