The Square Root of Summer (23 page)

I'm right. Gradually, the world begins to turn. Slow and creaking at first, like a carousel at a funfair, the first ride of the day. A
meow
as Umlaut starts clawing through my jeans. Wind begins to rustle through the tree. Nettle stings finally blossom on my ankles.

Faster now, the moth flutters through the branches, there's a whoop from the garden. Faster and faster, the crackle of the fire, the world going dark as the sun dips away.

I stay in the tree, and curl myself up like a caterpillar.

I'm not sure how much time passes, how long I wait until I hear Thomas calling my name. I know that I'm cold and that there's a pool of dark matter in the hollow of the tree. And I'm afraid of what's happening. How things that started off as beautiful, cosmic occurrences—stuttering stars and pi, floating in the air—have turned ugly and intense. The world is spiraling out of control.

And I don't think time restarting has anything to do with what I've done, mathematically.

“I'm up here,” I yell.

A few seconds later, his face pokes through the leaves. It's a question.

Our eyes meet, and I nod.

“I'm really pissed off at you,” I tell him.

“Fair enough.”

“But I've got nettle stings. And I'm cold. So I'm coming out of the tree.”

“Okay.”

After I climb down, I let Thomas take my hand.

“I don't forgive you, or anything,” I say.

As we walk through the garden, Ned and Sof have their heads together, hair mingling as they whisper. She looks up as we go by. “You okay?” she mouths. I nod.

Thomas holds my hand as he leads me inside, into the kitchen. He holds my hand as we detour into the pantry, as he rummages one-handed past the Marmite tower to grab something I can't see. He holds my hand all the way to the bathroom, and then he holds my hand as I sit on the edge of the bath, and he cranks on the taps. He did promise me friends. He did promise me he wouldn't let go.

The water is Niagara Falls loud, and we don't speak as he lets go to undo the jar he grabbed from the kitchen, dumping the entire thing in the water. Bicarbonate of soda.

I look a question at him.

“Grey,” Thomas shouts over the water. “He taught my mom to do this when I had chicken pox. I guess it'll work for nettles.”

Mutely, I nod, staring at the water as it turns milky white, filling up to the brim. I'm shivering as I stand up and yank off my jeans, and Thomas turns away. I climb into the bath in my T-shirt. The warmth and the relief of the water on the stings is so good I actually growl.

Thomas laughs, sitting down on the floor, his back against the bath.

“You sound like Umlaut.”

“It's good.” Two-word sentences are all I can manage.

The water's hot and deep, up to my neck, and opaque. When was the last time I had a bath? The day after Thomas arrived, when I crashed my bike, and all I wanted was for him to go away. Now I'm back in the tub, and he's leaving. Ironic.

Also ironic: there's a wormhole in the bath. Life moves forwards and I go backwards. What is it I'm missing? What more does the world want from me? It's already so fucked up.

“Aren't I a total gentleman?” asks Thomas, not turning round.

“You are.” I splosh the water with my hands. I could fall asleep in here. “I feel like I'm in a science experiment.”

“Dropping you into a bathful of fizzing chemical compounds?” There's a smirk in his voice. “Are you … in your element?”

Thomas jazz-hands over his head at me. I want to clamber out of the bath, and kiss him. I want to clamber out of the bath, and clobber him. How can he be going away again? How could he lie to me?

I laugh, at his stupid joke, at his stupid hands. It mutates into a sob.

“G, please don't—” Thomas breaks off. “Can I turn around?”

I nod, my face buried in my hands, my hands buried in my knees. I don't care.

“I'm taking that as a yes,” he says, and then his arms are around me as I go into full meltdown, crying into his shoulder. “I'm sorry. For a while, I really did think you knew. Then when I realized you had no idea … I didn't know what to do. I don't want you to hate me.”

“I don't want you to go,” I say, my face hot. I'm falling apart in Thomas's arms.

There's a wormhole reaching for me, and I'm bruises and hurt as I hold on to him. I don't want to disappear. I don't want to do this anymore, but I don't know how to stop it. I'm here. I want to exist.

I'm ready to live in the world again, but the world won't let me.

He's warm and safe and cinnamon as he promises me, “I have to go. But you remember my promise, right? I'll always—”

Before I hear the rest, I spin away down the drain.

 

Thursday 5 September (Last Year)

[Minus four]

I'm sweating hot. Autumn, and the air is glossy with sunshine. It's the wrong day to be wearing a black wool dress. Any day is the wrong day for what we're doing.

We've been standing, singing hymns I don't know, for ten minutes. I'm not used to wearing heels; Sof got the bus to town and bought me these. They've rubbed all the skin off the back of my feet—I can feel my tights sticking to the blood. I sway in the heat, shifting my weight from one foot to another.
I want to sit down,
I think. Then immediately try to unthink it.

Ned grips my elbow as I sway, and I look up at him. His hair is tied back in a neat bun.

“You okay?” he mouths. I nod as the hymn finishes and we sit down with a murmur, a clatter of pews, a rustle of paper. There's a pause while the pastor climbs back up to the lectern. I glance over my shoulder, searching for Jason. He's looking at Ned, not me. Sof catches my eye. I turn back to the front.

“Grots,” Ned hisses at me, nodding at the coffin. “It kind of looks like a picnic basket.”

A giggle forms in the back of my throat. I chose it—one of those woven, willow branch ones. Grey would have been pushed out to sea and shot at with burning arrows if he could. Instead, after this, there's—

Don't think about it, don't think about it, don't.

We stand up again.

Papa gets the words of the next hymn wrong, confidently launching into a second chorus. Ned snorts.

It's been like this all day, lurching from ordinary to horror, a binary rhythm.

Washing my hair with mint-flavor shampoo, eating a piece of toast. Putting Marmite on the table before I remembered. Pulling on black tights even though it's twenty-nine degrees outside and Grey would want us all barefoot anyway. I took them on and off a thousand times and I was still ready too early. Ned's arm around me on the sofa, flicking through the channels. Waiting for the motorcade to arrive, even though the church is a five-minute walk from our house.

Traveling in a hearse. Feeling hungry. Trying to remember what food I asked the pub to prepare for afterwards. Papa red-eyed. Ned asking me to tie his tie.

The word
eulogy
.

Listening to the pastor talk about James Montella. Thinking, who's that? Why aren't you calling him Grey? Everybody laughing at a story the pastor tells about him trying to jump across the canal to prove something, and his daughter asking him to at least hand over the keys to the Book Barn first. I try to remember, then understand he's talking about something that happened before I was born. He's talking about Mum.

We're standing up again, another hymn. I wince, my feet aching.

“Take them off.” It's Ned, his hand steady on my shoulder. “It's okay, Grotbags. Take them off.”

It's what Grey would do. But I can't, I don't deserve to be comfortable, and I sway in the heat and I'm falling—

 

Saturday 16 August

[Minus three hundred and forty-nine and Minus three]

“No, like—forsythia, or heather. That color yellow.”

The florist shows me more lilies, creamy ones, and I want to shout at her because she's not getting it. She won't give me yellow tulips and it has to be right; it has to be yellow tulips at the funeral! I'm practically screaming it, and she's looking at me blankly, saying, “It's September…”—

*   *   *

[Minus two]

I yank the dress over my head. It gets caught around my bra. I'm sweating already, huffing and puffing as I tug on the zip. Sof's outside the changing room curtain and she needs to shut UP, everything comes up too short around my thighs and stretches tight round my armpits, I'm too tall. I'd never choose this dress anyway, this color. It's black, but then, it's supposed to be—

*   *   *

[Minus one]

The phone in the kitchen rings and none of us move to answer it, just carry on staring at nothing like we have been all evening. After a second, the machine cuts in. “This is James, Jeurgen, Edzard, and Margot,” Grey's voice booms out and then he starts chuckling at our ridiculous names and he's laughing fit to burst, it fills the room, like his death is just a big cosmic joke the universe is playing on us. Ha, ha, ha—

*   *   *

It's obvious what's coming next. Since the funeral, I've been lurching in and out of time, closer and closer to Grey's death. Four wormholes in three days, their intensity and frequency leaving me dizzy. I only know it's Saturday, the day of the party, because this morning Ned was staggering round the kitchen, haphazardly assembling a bacon sandwich and asking me if I wanted to borrow his eyeliner for tonight.

I have time-travel jet lag and a sick, sour headache. There's a stale taste in my mouth as I sit in the Book Barn, a pool of darkness waiting in the shadows. Papa is harrumphing. He's prowling around the shelves near the desk, while I painstakingly type. The computer is so slow, it clicks and whirs between each keystroke.

In between each click and each whir, there's a harrumph.

It's setting my teeth on edge. Especially as I'm not actually inputting the receipts, like I'm supposed to be—all those clicks and whirs are another email to Ms. Adewunmi. She hasn't replied to the first one I sent. What is it with me and emails?

I want my fingers to fly across the keyboard, minding their own business, spilling out everything that's happened, from split screens to apple trees, how the Weltschmerzian Exception is out of control. I know exactly what the next wormhole will be, and when it's coming out of the shadows—it will be at the party tonight.

Isn't that what this whole summer has been about? Inevitability.

I need to know how to stop it. I've got five hours. And, essay or not, I need to do this without clicks, and whirs, and winces.

Click.

Whir.

Ow.

“Harrumph. Harrumph. Gottie.”

I look up to see Papa itching from one foot to another in front of the desk. Automatically, I cover my notebook with my hand.

“Nearly done. I'm just waiting for the computer to catch up,” I lie, nodding at the list on the other side of the keyboard.

“Ah, so.” He nods. Then pulls out the other chair and sits down opposite me, tweaking his trousers upwards. He's wearing red Converse again, and his serious face—the one he had when he announced Thomas's arrival. The one he had when he came out into the corridor at the hospital last September, and told us we could go home.

“Margot,” Papa begins, formally. Then he clears his throat and picks up Umlaut, fussing him on his knee. He's brought the kitten to work? “Gottie.
Liebling
.”

I wait, fiddling obsessively with my pen and trying to arrange my face into the nonguilty expression of a teenager who isn't half destroying the fabric of reality.

“Ned saw Thomas coming out of your room last Sunday. Morning.”

Oh. Unbelievable.
And
Papa's waited nearly a week to talk to me! Grey would have marched in there and dragged us both out by our ears.

“Do I need to have a talk with you”—a series of harrumphs—“
du Spinner
, I
do
need to have a talk, about you and Thomas.”

I'm relieved as I realize Papa's talk is
that
talk, the sex talk. Then shudder as I realize, ugh, it's
that
talk. I can't listen to this. I want to lie down in a dark room for several hours and vomit repeatedly. That sounds restful.

“It's—fine—we're not—” I babble, grinning brightly.

We're really not—I don't think. The wormholes have me lurching in and out of time, so I don't know exactly what's happened since the beach, the tree, the bath. He's leaving, and he lied.

LIGHT BLUE TOUCH PAPER AND LEAVE
, Grey wrote about me in his diaries. My temper isn't as quick as his was—a fireworks show that faded after the first
ooh
. I stick to mine, stubborn and unforgiving. Resenting Sof for not understanding me anymore, resenting Ned for being happy, resenting my mother for dying. I don't want to resent Thomas for leaving. But I don't know what we are to each other either.

“We're not…” I repeat to Papa. “And if we are, it's new, brand-new in fact. And I know all the stuff. So, um.”

“Ah.” Papa nods. I'm hoping he'll harrumph his way
anywhere else
so I can die of mortification, but he just sits there. I'm bracing myself for a rare telling off—the sort where he puffs up and starts hissing, like an angry goose—when he adds, “It's good to make sure, because we—me, your mami—we didn't know.
Empfängnisverhütung
.”

I nod warily.
Obviously
they didn't know. Ned is empirical evidence of the not-knowing.