Part 32 (1/2)

Huw opened the door and gave me a hug, munching a Chinese radish. 'Mo! You got here! Sorry I couldn't meet you at the airport... If John had given me a little more warning, I'd have rescheduled my day.'

'h.e.l.lo, Huw. It was plain sailing until I got to your building. I thought the fourth floor meant the third floor. Or the third, the fourth. Anyway, your neighbour put me right.'

'Hong Kong's never quite sure of itself. British or American or Chinese numbering, even I still get muddled. Come in, put down your bag, have some tea and a bath.'

'Huw. I don't know how to thank you for this.'

'Nonsense. Us Celts have got to stick together. You're my first house-guest, we'll have to make things up as we go along. Come and inspect your quarters. Not a patch on your chalet, I'm afraid-'

'My ex-employer's chalet-'

'Your ex-employer's chalet. Here you are! Chez Mo. Cramped and messy, but it's yours, and unless the CIA has c.o.c.kroaches on its payroll they'll never find you.'

'In my limited experience the CIA has a lot of c.o.c.kroaches on its payroll.'

The room was no more cramped or messy than fifty labs I'd worked in. There was a sofabed ready for me to crash on, bless Huw, a desk, stacks of books that would bury me with one mild earth tremor, and a vase of flamingo orchids. 'The lavatory's through there, if you stand on it and twist your neck around you get a cracking view of Kowloon harbour.'

It was as humid as a launderette. Hives of life rumbled on the other sides of the floor, walls and ceiling. The tenement across the alley was so close that our window frames seemed to share the same gla.s.s. Trains grinded, little things scuttled, and somewhere a giant bicycle pump was cranking itself up and hissing itself down.

The life of a conscience-led scientist. 'It's perfect, Huw. Can I use your computer?'

'Your computer,' insisted Huw. computer,' insisted Huw.

The fire in the kitchen hearth wheezed and popped. Liam and I looked at one another, suddenly at a loss. The tiles chilled my toes. I'd polished this reunion for so long, but now I could only gawp. I remembered baby goblin Liam, I remembered the adolescent mutant he'd been last summer with b.u.mfluff on his top lip, and I saw the raffish man he'd make in a decade or two. As well-summered as you can get in Dublin, his hair was gelled, he'd got an ear stud and his jaw was squatter.

'Mam-' his voice had become a ba.s.soon.

'Liam-' I said at exactly the same time, my voice a flautist's mistake.

'Oh for the love of G.o.d you two,' muttered John.

It was suddenly all right and Liam was hugging me first and hardest. I hugged back harder and until we both groaned, but that wasn't why I wanted to cry. 'You're supposed to be at Uni, you malingerer. Who gave you permission to grow so much in my absence?'

'Ma, who gave you permission to do a James Bond G.o.d-knows-where in my my absence? And who did that to your eye?' absence? And who did that to your eye?'

I looked at John around Liam's shoulder. 'You have a point. I'm sorry. A knight in s.h.i.+ning armour did this to my eye. I forgave him. He'd knocked me out of the path of a taxi.'

'”A point”, she calls it Da, you hear that?'

I karate-chopped his sides.

'Don't I get an apology too?' whinged John.

'Shut up, Cullin,' I said, 'you're only the father and you don't have any rights.'

'I'll just go and blunder off a cliff then and leave you two to it.'

'Happy birthday! Da! Sorry I couldn't get back last night. I stayed at Kevin's in Baltimore.'

'Blame your ma. She only phoned from London yesterday morning.'

'I can't do anything to her. She's bearhugging me.'

'You just have to wait until it pa.s.ses.'

I let Liam go. 'Off with your coat and sit by the fire. The fog's made you clammy. And don't tell me those ridiculous s.p.a.ceman trainers keep your feet dry. Now tell me about university. Is Knyfer McMahon still Faculty Head? What are you doing for your first-year thesis?'

'No, Ma, no! I haven't seen you for half a year, with only your voice on tapes. Where have you you been and what have been and what have you you been doing? Tell her, Da!' been doing? Tell her, Da!'

'John Cullin, did you teach our son to answer back to his elders and betters?'

'You just have to wait until it pa.s.ses. Anyway, I'm only the father. Tea?'

Liam sniffed. 'Please.'

Planck was still running around in nervous wagging circles.

In my first week in Hong Kong, I did very little. I got lost and unlost and lost in byways and overways and underways. A quarter of the world, teeming in a few square miles. Huw was right. If I avoided computer link-ups I was probably untraceable. But after Switzerland I felt I had crash-landed on a strange planet where privacy and peace were coincidences rather than rights. 'Dispense with the niceties,' advised Huw, 'and learn to do inside your head what you can't do outside.'

I got a fake British pa.s.sport made, for only fifty US dollars.

I watched the television war. I watched the weaponry a.n.a.lysed, hyped and billed: Scud versus Homer, Batman versus the Joker. The war had been 'won' days before, the supply of cheap oil secured, but that was no longer the point. Technology efficacy needed to be tested in combat conditions, and to use up stockpiles. The wretched army of conscripts from the enemy's ethnic minorities were the laboratory rats. Quancog's laboratory rats. My laboratory rats.

I recorded a tape of me and Hong Kong, and posted it to John, via Siobhan in Cork, John's Aunt Triona in Baltimore, Billy, Father Wally and thus to John. I prayed it would get through undetected, a snail invisible to radar.

Huw was suddenly dispatched to Petersburg, so there I was: alone, unknown, unemployed, a box of hundred-dollar notes concealed in the freezer compartment under bags of peas. My escape plan had worked too well. No kidnapper from phantom crime networks so much as dropped in for a chat. Had the Texan just been bluffing? Trying to scare me to Saragosa?

Now what?

We create models to explain nature, but the models wind up gatecras.h.i.+ng nature and driving away the original inhabitants. In my lecturing days most of my students believed that atoms really are solid little stellar nuclei orbited by electrons. When I tell them that n.o.body knows what an electron is, they look at me like I've told them that the sun is a watermelon. One of the better read-up ones might put up their hand and say, 'But Dr Muntervary, isn't an electron a charged probability wave?'

'Suppose now,' I am fond of saying, 'I prefer to think of it as a dance.'

Forty summers ago, two miles away from Aodhagan Croft. There is a c.h.i.n.k in the floorboards in the upstairs room of the house in the sycamores. After I've been put to bed, I sometimes pull back the rug and look down into the parlour. My ma wears her white dress and her cultured pearls, and Da a black s.h.i.+rt. On the gramophone revolves a new 78 rpm from Dublin.

'No no no, Jack Muntervary,' Ma scolds, 'you've got two left feet. Elephant ones.'

'Chinatown, my Chinatown,' crackles the gramophone.

'Try again.'

Their shadows dance on the walls.

What now, indeed?

I was still a physicist, even if n.o.body knew it but me. The idea crept up and announced itself while I was haggling down the price of grapefruits in the market. Pink grapefruits pink as dawn. Strip quantum cognition down to first principles, and rebuild it incorporating nonlocality, instead of trying to lock nonlocality out. Before I'd paid for the grapefruits, ideas for formulae were kicking down the door. I bought a leather-bound black notebook from a stationer's, sat down next to a stone dragon and scribbled eight pages of calculations, before I spilt them and lost them.