Ghostwalk (32 page)

Authors: Rebecca Stott

Thirty-five

T
hey put up a plaque to you today, Cameron Brown, on the 19th of November, 2004, in the chapel at Trinity, nearly two years after your death. That’s a kind of triumph, don’t you think? You would have liked that. Another of Trinity’s famous men. Not a bench in a park, or a statue like they gave Newton, but a bronze plaque in the chapel. Just a plaque, but very simple and in good taste: “To the memory of Cameron Brown, neuroscientist, 1954–2003.” Sarah was there and your boys, so I didn’t stay. She looks better than the last time I saw her; it hit her hard—the court case and all those stories that had to come out about you and me. There were speeches when they unveiled the plaque. I slipped away.

I have Lily’s funeral to go to. She hanged herself in Holloway on the 11th of November, just a week ago, when the wardens turned away for long enough. She said she would, so we knew it was just a question of time. Couldn’t go on, she said. She was of no use, she said, in prison. There was nothing we could do about that. Once she had read that last chapter of Elizabeth’s book, it was just a matter of time, as it is for me. A question of time. “We are only like dead walls, or vaulted graves/That, ruin’d, yield no echo.”

Dilys will come with me to Lily’s funeral. But none of Lily’s people will be there. They can’t, you see. Your people have smashed theirs. It worked in the end. The laws have been changed, the networks scattered. Their time is over. The police investigation failed, of course, to uncover the link between the Syndicate and NABED and instead established that Lily Ridler had conspired in the deaths of Elizabeth Vogelsang, Emmanuel Scorsa, and Cameron Brown, and in the attack on Lydia Brooke, as part of a campaign of violence orchestrated by a terrorist organisation called NABED. She continued to protest her innocence and refused to reveal the names of any of the other members of the group. None have been found.

Who was standing behind you on that Trinity staircase at dawn? An embittered alchemist in a red gown trying to erase the last traces of a historical record or a man in a black balaclava, a member of the Syndicate working to protect the secrecy of a chemical formula that paralyses its victims and will, sooner or later, escalate the war on terror? Two particles moving together across time and space, shadowing each other. One turns one way; the other follows.

Coincidences. How many times does a piece of paper have to fly away in a windless garden for it to stop being a coincidence? I never worked that out.

I dreamed last night that I was running through an ancient city at night, between canals and old walls, cobbled and stained with lichen and mould. It was a rat run. A maze. I couldn’t get out. There was no one to be seen. Sometimes it was like a film—a Buñuel—where everyone is forever trying to get somewhere in beautiful clothes, high heels, and silk shawls, but they’ve forgotten where they’re going and they’re hungry and disoriented. I ran first my fingertips and then my knuckles along the wall. It felt familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I had seen it before. There were alleyways and arches and doorways and sometimes there was water, like little quays alongside the path. Rats swam up against the edge; one scrambled out of the water and onto stone, its great tail slithering like a wet snake behind it. Then it was gone. I had forgotten something important. Something I was supposed to do. I was following something in red—a child who seemed to be weeping, then a cat that was bleeding. Don’t worry, I said. I’m coming. I’m coming. Then it was me ahead in the red coat, bleeding, wounded, crying. And I was you, following me. It made no sense.

I woke, falling through moon shadows, sweating; I woke feeling you watching me, lying close.

Is the light, freighted with water, still shoaling across the walls of The Studio? Can the surface of the present still rub away and let the past through? What else might come to be possible? You might know, Cameron. You who have passed to the other side, you who watch me, you whom I see always out of the corner of my eye, whom I catch still on the edges of my vision. You who are always there. Time past and time future, what might have been and what has been, point to one end, which is always present. And you, Cameron Brown, man of fractures and disguises, lie close still, under, between, inside, for we became once, and still are, entangled together, imprisoned, like time, in a skein of silk.

For a Further Understanding of Newton