Part 30 (2/2)

'He's written exactly twice,' said Bernadette's little sister Hanna climbing out of a rotting laundry basket, before being hosed away squealing into the oyster shed.

'Aye,' said Father Wally. 'It was a grand fayre. And heavenly weather for the Fastnet Races. The Baltimore lifeboat got called out again, though. A catamaran capsized. Maybe you'll be here for the races next year?'

'I hope so. I really hope so.'

'Will Liam be coming back to Clear before the weekend, Mo?' Bernadette was too unschooled to feign indifference well. She had wound a curl of hair around her little finger and was not looking where she was pointing her hose.

If only. 'He'd better not be. It's slap bang in the middle of the autumn term.'

Father Wally gave me a slightly strange look. Had I given a slightly strange answer? 'Well then, Mo. Don't keep the man waiting.'

'Is he at home?'

'Was but an hour ago. I dropped by to extricate my King's rook from his pincer.'

'I'll say cheerio for now, then, Father Wally. Bernadette.'

'Mind how you go now.'

'Science is the game,' Dr Hammer, my mentor at Queen's was fond of saying. 'Its secrets are the stake. Errors are the card sharks. Scientists are the mugs.'

Niels Bohr, the great Dane of Quantum Physics, was fond of saying: 'It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.' Physics concerns what we can say about nature.'

The double-crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: it's the study of historians' studies. Historians have their axes to grind, just as physicists do.

Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present.

I remember the sun streaming in through the skylight of Heinz Formaggio's office. The view was operatic. The mountains fringing Lake Geneva were crumpled mauve and silver. By the lakeside, under a folly with a copper weatherc.o.c.k, a gnomish gardener trimmed the baize lawn. Mercury was jetpacking off his marble pedestal in his winged helmet.

Heinz had introduced the Texan as 'Mr Stolz'. There was a ten-gallon hat on the sofa. He took off his sungla.s.ses and regarded me with his ill-occluding eyes.

'Were you to desert at this stage,' Heinz was reasoning, 'you would be walking out at a crucial stage. You're the anchorman of a heavyweight team here, Mo. This isn't a Sat.u.r.day job you can just resign from at the drop of a pin.'

'I can resign. I resigned yesterday. Read the letter again.'

Avuncular-Heinz. 'Mo I understand the ups and downs of think-tank life. It's a peculiar environment. I have these moments of doubt myself. I'm sure Mr Stolz has them.' The Texan just watched me. 'But they pa.s.s. I implore you to put this drastic decision on ice for a month or two.'

'My drastic decision has already been made, Heinz.'

Flabbergasted-Heinz. 'Where are you going to go? What about Liam, and his scholars.h.i.+p from us? There are a hundred considerations here to weigh up properly.'

'All weighed up. And my son's education does not require your money.'

Moral blackmailer-Heinz. 'You're being poached, aren't you? We all receive better offers at the cutting edge, Mo. What gives you the right to be so selfish? Who are you going to?'

'I'm going to grow turnips in County Cork.'

'Being facetious is not helping. Light Box has a right to know. We have the CERN facilities completely to ourselves in April. The Saragosa supercollider data is due in next week. These could be Quancog's way out of the nonlocality straitjacket. Why now?'

I sighed. 'It's in the letter.'

'Did you really believe that Light Box conducts experiments purely for fun?'

'No. I really believed that Light Box conducts experiments purely for s.p.a.ce agencies. That's what we've been told quantum cognition is for. Then a war comes along, and I discover that my modest contribution to global enlightenment is being used in air-to-surface missiles to kill people who aren't white enough.'

'Must you be so melodramatic? The border where military and civilian applications of aeros.p.a.ce technology meet has always been subjective. Face it, Mo. It's the way the world works.'

'Somebody is fed bulls.h.i.+t for four years; they find out they've been fed bulls.h.i.+t for four years; they want out. Face it, Heinz. It's the way the world works.'

The Texan s.h.i.+fted his weight and the sofa creaked. 'Mr Formaggio, it's plain that Dr Muntervary values precision.' He spoke with the leisure of a never-interrupted man. 'I can relate to that. As a friend of Quancog, I believe I can show a wider panorama. May I chew the fat alone with the lady?'

A rhetorical question.

The thin face in the window of Ancient O'Farrell's store swam back into the murk as I climbed the lane. The shop had no opening hours and no closing hours, but Ancient's wife never met anyone unless Ancient, or their son, Old O'Farrell, was with her. Even in my childhood she had always been suspicious of the mainland: of Britain and the world beyond, suspicious of its very existence. Baltimore, she would concede, was there. But beyond Baltimore was a land insubstantial as radio waves.

If both Ancient and Old were out you just went into the shop, helped yourself, and left the money in the s...o...b..x. I took a breather on the gate to O'Driscoll's meadow. This hill gets steeper every time I come back to the island, I swear. A couple of old ladies in black cloaks were beachcombing the strand, down where the dune gra.s.s ends. They walked like crows. They looked up at me in unison and waved. Moya and Roisin Tourmakeady! I waved back. We used to believe they were witches who caused whirlpools. Owls lived in their attic, and probably still do.

Coming back was dangerous, Mo. They'd be here soon. It was a minor miracle that you got this far. A miracle, and the splendid isolation of Aer Lingus's computer systems.

Coming back was dangerous, but not coming back was impossible.

The sun was warm, moss was thick on the stone wall, ferns nodded.

With only three motorbikes on Clear Island, islanders can identify each by the engine. Red Kildare pulled up, his sidecar empty, and pushed up his goggles.

'They let you back then, Mo? That's quite a s.h.i.+ner you're sporting.'

'Red. You look like a defrocked wizard. Yes, my wicket-keeping days for the national team are drawing to a close.'

Red Kildare, like John, is a newcomer to Clear. He first came as a 'Blow-In' in the sixties, when an attempt to found a colony of freethinkers based on the philosophy of Timothy Leary went the same way as Timothy Leary, and dwindled down to Red, his pigs and goats and a few wild stories. He milks Feynman for John every day up at Aodhagan, and pays in goat cheese and by tidying up the vegetable garden. John says he still grows the best marijuana this side of Cuba. His Gaelic is better than mine, now.

'I thought of you the other day, Mo.'

'Really?'

'Yeah... A dead bat fell out of the sky and landed at my feet.'

'I'm glad to know I've been gone but not forgotten, Red.'

The goggles were snapped back on. 'Got to speak to a turkey about Daibhi O'Bruadair. Mind how you go.'

He twisted the throttle on his ancient Norton, waking up a piglet in the floor of the sidecar, who clambered onto the seat and fell down again as the motorbike roared off.

Heinz Formaggio showed his anger only by a m.u.f.fled slam of the door.

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