Ghostwritten

Clear Island

Gasping and dripping I opened my eyes, a sun spun from bright seawater. I looked at Billy in the cabin who was trying not to laugh. I mouthed ‘Rat’ and he laughed. St Fachtna cleared the cross-currents between Illaunbrock shoal and Clarrigmore rock, rounded the west cape of Sherkin Island, and my black book and I, after a trip of twelve thousand miles, could see the end. Clear Island moved into view, my face felt crusty as the seawater dried, and here was home.

The lonely arm of Ardatruha pointing out to the Atlantic. I watched the light on the waves. The shades of blue where the reefs dropped away into the deeps. Cliffs tumbling round the back of Carriglure. Meadows in hollows and pastures on rises. The shabby harbour in the crook of the headland. A few miles of looping roads. The cemetery, the island’s politest place. St Ciaran’s Well. An island as old as the world.

Billy’s mute daughter nudged at me, offering me her father’s binoculars.

‘Thank you, Mary.’

The houses swam into focus. I could see my godparents, Maisie and Brendan Mickledeen pottering out on the verandah of The Green Man, and thought of the mechanical figurines on the town clock opposite my lab in Zurich. Ancient O’Farrell’s grocery store at the foot of Baile Iarthach, doubling up as the post office and trebling up as the gossip exchange. Damn me if that isn’t Bertie Crow’s ancient three-wheeler vanishing over the neck of Cnocan an Choimhthigh! Won’t it ever give up the ghost?

What is it that ties shapes of land to the human heart, Mo?

At the water’s edge was the clump of sycamore trees smothering the falling-down croft where I was born. I wonder if the roof’s fallen in yet.

I remember the strong-jawboned of Switzerland, driving around their polished towns in the latest German sportscars. I remember the spindly kids who scratched together a living in the Kowloon streets around Huw’s apartment building. I remember my lucky childhood, galloping over this island and prising out its secrets. Birth deals us out a hand of cards, but as important as their value is the place we are dealt them in.

‘You’ve brought us some heavenly weather, Mo,’ Billy yelled over the diesel engine. ‘It was bucketing down this morning. Did you miss us?’

I nod, unable to take my eyes off the island. I missed all eight square miles of you! In Smug Zurich and Euromoney Geneva and Pell Mell Hong Kong and Merciless Beijing and Damned London I could close my eyes and see your topography, like I could John’s body. I watch the cormorants sail on the wind, from the south today, and I watch the gannets dive and vanish into mBairneach bay. I suddenly want to grin and blubber like a madwoman, to shout back at Baltimore and the low mountains and all the way to Cork, ‘You blew it! I got here! I’m home! Come and get me!’

An island of cloud rounds the sun, and the temperature drops. I am goosepimpled.

Only give me a little time first, with John and Liam.

The boat slows to a chug. Billy steers the St Fachtna into the harbour.

The night the US staged its ‘pre-emptive strike’ I was holding an impromptu dinner party at my chalet. Daniella, the brightest of that year’s postgrads doing a research placement at Light Box, had switched on the satellite news just to get the weather, and we were still watching six hours later, picking at cold food with dead appetites. Alain was down from Paris, and a friend of John’s from Hong Kong called Huw. The TV showed the night skyline of a burning city in the Gulf.

A young pilot was talking with a CNN reporter whose hair was not his own. ‘Yessir, the whole place was lit up like the prettiest Fourth of July I sure ever did see!’

‘We’ve been hearing about the surgical precision of the missile strikes, thanks to Homer Quancog technology.’

‘Yessir, with the Homers you can pick your elevator shaft. The boys at mission control program in the building blueprints, and you sit back and let the missile’s flight computer do the thinking for you. Just let those babies rip! Straight down the elevator shafts!’

Alain spilt some wine. ‘Putain! Next he tells us the missiles buy a stick of bread and walk the doggie.’

A general wearing a torso of medals was talking in the Washington studio. ‘For Americans, freedom is an inalienable right. For all. Homer Technology is revolutionising warfare. We can hit these evil dictators hard, where it hurts, with minimum collateral damage to the civilians they tyrannise.’

John phoned from Clear Island. ‘This isn’t news, it’s sports coverage. Have so many films been made about hi-tech war that hi-tech war is now a film? It’s product placement. Had anyone even heard of Homer Missiles two days ago?’

A sickening sense that this was coming for me. I was gnawing my knuckles.

‘Yeah... I’ve heard about them.’

‘Mo, love. Are you okay?’

‘No. John, I’ll have to phone you back.’

BBC footage. A street lit by ambulances and fire. ‘Film Censored by Enemy Forces’ scrolled across the screen. An Irish reporter from the North was holding a microphone to an Arab woman whose face glistened with sweat or blood or both. ‘Tell me! Ask your people, why dropping a bomb on baby food factory? Why is dropping a bomb on baby food factory necessary for your war? Tell me!’

Cut.

Back to the studio for more analysis with experts. Daniella had fallen asleep, so I covered her with a blanket and put another log on the fire.

‘“Pre-emptive strike”,’ said Huw, ‘must mean not declaring war until your cameras are in position.’

I felt weary. I peered through the curtain out at the night and the mountains, the Milky Way and a haggard middle-aged scientist looked back at me. So far you’ve stretched, Mo. You’ve become unelastic. When your mother was your age she was a widow. How much further will you have to stretch? The cold glass nipped the tip of my nose.

Do you hear the waterfall, over the meadow, at the foot of the mountain?

Three thousand miles away the forces of freedom and democracy were using the fruits of its finest scientific minds to crush Liams and Daniellas under buildings. Then we watch the rubble burn, and the fireworks above. Congratulations, Mo. This is your life.

‘My, it’s a sick zoo we’ve turned the world into.’

Alain heard, but misunderstood me. ‘No zoo kills off its own animals.’

My breath fogged everything up. ‘Out of our cages, and out of control of ourselves.’

Billy swung me onto the quayside with a ‘ta-rar!’ I swayed as I found my shore-legs. I could almost hear my bones grind. It could be the day I left. The row of fishing boats: Mayo Davitt’s Dun an Oir, Daibhi O’Bruadair’s Oilean na nEan, Scott’s Abigail Claire, repainted in blues and yellows, Red Kildare’s barnacled dinghy The South’s Gonna Rise Again, needing an overhaul worse than ever. Coils of ropes, hillocks of netting, oil barrels, plastic crates. Scraggy cats picked about their business. Inside is outside on islands. Things lie where they fall. I breathed in deep. Mulchy fishiness from the seawater, sweet-and-sourness from the sheep dung, diesel fumes from the boats’ engines.

‘Mo!’ Father Wally was perched on his tricycle over by the oyster sheds. Bernadette Sheehy was hosing down some lobster baskets, in a miniskirt and waders. He waved me over, grinning. ‘Mo! You’re back in time! Glorious weather you’ve brought back with you. It was bucketing it down this morning.’

‘Father Wally! You’re a picture of health.’ How right it feels to be conversing in Gaelic.

‘Octogenarians stop ageing. It becomes pointless. Whatever happened to your eye?’

‘I headbutted a taxi in London.’

‘How was your trip?’

‘There must be easier ways to hail a taxi, even English ones.’ We laughed, and I looked into his blue eighty-four-year-old eyes. What miraculous organs are eyes. How much Father Wally’s have seen—

A thump of panic — a snare drum—

Suppose the Texan had been here, recruiting locals? He had more money than the seventeen counties of the Republic.

Mo, calm down! Father Wally christened your mother. The table in the back parlour hosted year-long games of chess that stood testament to his friendship with John. If you start doubting Clear Islanders, the Texan has already won.

‘My trip? A bit gruelling to be honest with you, Father. Hi, Bernadette.’

The island beauty queen walked over. ‘Afternoon, Mo. Been far?’

‘Further than usual.’

‘You missed the best ever summer fayre. All the folks from Ballydehob and Schull and Baltimore too came over. A Norwegian birdwatcher called Hans fell in love with me. He writes to me every week.’

‘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. 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 weathercock, 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 sunglasses 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 Saturday 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 pass. 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 scholarship 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 space 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 aerospace technology meet has always been subjective. Face it, Mo. It’s the way the world works.’

‘Somebody is fed bullshit for four years; they find out they’ve been fed bullshit for four years; they want out. Face it, Heinz. It’s the way the world works.’

The Texan shifted 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 shoebox. 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 grass 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 shiner 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 muffled slam of the door.

The Texan and I looked at each other across the office. The gnome in the garden was still clipping. I almost said, ‘Draw,’ but I almost say things much more often than I say them. ‘You must be very important indeed if you can dismiss Heinz from his own office.’

‘I was afraid the good Director was going to start thundering at you.’

‘Being thundered at by Heinz is like being flogged by a lettuce.’

He reached into his shirt pocket. ‘You don’t mind if I smoke, Doctor?’

‘Light Box has a no-smoking policy.’

He lit up, tipped the contents of a bowl of pot pourri onto a Light Box folder, and used the bowl as an ashtray. ‘I overheard a joke at my expense the other day: No in-tray, no out-tray, just an ash-tray.’

‘Forgive me for not believing you.’

His smile told me that it wasn’t very important whether I believed him or not. ‘Dr Muntervary, I’m a Texan. Did you know that Texas was an independent republic before joining the union?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘We Texans are a proud tribe. We pride ourselves in being straight shooters. Let us do some. The Pentagon requires that Quantumcog see completion.’

‘Then go ahead and complete it.’

‘Only Light Box Research can do that. We both know why. That is, we both know who. Light Box Research has Mo Muntervary.’

‘As from yesterday nobody has Mo Muntervary.’

He blew out a plume of smoke, and watched it unfurl. ‘If it were that simple...’

‘It is that simple.’

‘Kings abdicate, cops turn in their badges, directors of Think Tanks can slam all the doors they like and storm off, and nobody gives a damn. But you, Doctor, can never leave the ball-park. This is a fact. Accept it.’

‘Is this plain talking? Because I don’t understand what I’m hearing.’

‘Then I’ll phrase it differently. Light Box is only one research institute in the marketplace. Syndicates in Russia, Indonesia, South Africa, Israel and China are headhunting scientists like you. There’s a new confederation of Arab countries that really doesn’t like us. There are three freelance military consultancies who want quantum cognition, one of them, our British cousins. The marketplace is getting crowded and cut-throat. The Pentagon wishes to invite you to work with us. Our less democratic competitors will coerce you. Wherever and however you hide, you will be found, and your services employed, whether you like it or not. Am I talking plain enough for you now, Dr Muntervary?’

‘And how exactly can anyone “coerce” me?’

‘By kidnapping your boy and locking him in a concrete box until you produce the required results.’

‘That’s not remotely funny.’

He lifted a briefcase onto his lap. ‘Good.’ The briefcase clips thwacked open. ‘Here is a file, containing photographs and information on the techniques employed by headhunters. Verify them through your own channels: your Amnesty friends in Dublin will know the names. Look at it later,’ he passed me the file, ‘but not before you eat. One more thing.’ He threw me a little black cylinder, the size of a camera film case. ‘Carry this.’

I looked at it, lying on my lap, but didn’t pick it up. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s a chicken switch, programmed with your right thumbprint. It flips open like a lighter. If you press the button then one of our people will be with you within four minutes.’

‘Why should I swallow this hogwash? And why me?’

‘The New World Order is Old Hat. War is making a major comeback — not that it had ever gone anywhere — and scientists like you win wars for generals like me. Because quantum cognition, if spliced with Artifical Intelligence and satellite technology in the way that you have proposed in your last five papers, would render existing nuclear technology as lethal as a shower of tennis balls.’

‘And how do these phantom headhunters know about my research at Light Box?’

‘The same way we all do. Old-fashioned industrial espionage.’

‘Nobody’s going to kidnap me. Look at me. I’m middle-aged. Only Einstein, Dirac and Feynman made major contributions in their forties.’

The Texan stubbed out his cigarette, and tipped the pot pourri back into the bowl. ‘A lot of people kiss your ass, Doctor, and if I thought it would do any good I’d kiss your ass too. But listen really good. I can’t make heads or tails of your matrix mechanics, your quantum chromodynamics, and your nothing turning into something by energy borrowed from nowhere. But I do know that no more than ten people alive can make Quancog a reality. We have six of them, now, in Saragosa, in west Texas. I’m offering you a job. Come this fall, we were going to relocate Light Box’s Quancog project there wholesale, and offer you a package of incentives the usual way. But your resignation letter has forced our hand.’

‘Why should I work for you? Your president’s a shallow crook.’

‘Doesn’t take an egg-head to see that. But of all the shallow crooks with fingers on buttons today, who would you rather own Quancog?’

‘Quancog as a military application? Nobody should own it.’

‘Come to Texas, Dr Muntervary. Of all the agencies who want you, only ours will respect your conscience, and the rights of your boy Liam and John Cullin. You see me as your enemy, Doctor. I can live with that. In my world enemies and friends are defined by context. Understand that I’m on your side before it’s too late.’

I looked out at Mercury.

‘I always liked that one,’ said the Texan, following my gaze. ‘Lived by his wits.’

The pub sign of The Green Man squeaked as it swung. Maisie was leaning on the stone wall, looking out to sea through her telescope. Brendan was around the other side, pottering about in the vegetable patch. Maisie’s last grey hairs had turned white.

‘Afternoon, Maisie.’

She swung the telescope at me, and her mouth opened. ‘As I live and breathe! Mo Muntervary come back to haunt us! I saw a funny hat get off the St Fachtna,’ she lowered the eyepiece, ‘but I thought it was a birdwatcher come for the Thewicker’s Geese. Whatever happened to your eye?’

‘It got hit by a rogue electron in a lab experiment.’

‘Even when you were knee-high you were always bumping into things. Brendan! Come and see who it isn’t! Now Mo, why weren’t you back for the summer fayre?’

Brendan limped over. ‘Mo! You’ve brought some grand weather back with you this time! John was in sinking the Guinness last night, but he nary breathed a word of your homecoming. Holy Dooley, that’s a black-eye and a half ! Put a steak on it!’

‘I didn’t want a fuss. But aren’t the roses a picture! And how do you get honeysuckle to run riot at the end of October?’

‘Dung!’ answered Maisie. ‘Good and fresh from Bertie Crow’s cows, and the bees. Keep a hive, Mo, when you settle down. Care for the bees and the bees care for you. You should have seen the runner beans this year! Beauties, they were, eh Brendan?’

‘Aye, they turned out well enough, Maisie.’ He inspected the bowl of his dogwood pipe, the same one he’d smoked for half a century. ‘You see your ma in Skibbereen, Mo?’

‘I did.’

‘And how was she?’

‘Comfortable, but less lucid. At least she can’t do herself an injury where she is.’

‘That’s true enough.’ Maisie let a respectful silence go by. ‘You’ve lost too much weight, Mo. I thought you live on fondues and Toblerone chocolate in Switzerland.’

‘I’ve been on a trip, Maisie. That’s why I’m on the lean side.’

‘Lecture circuit, no doubt?’ Brendan’s eyes gleamed with pride.

‘You might call it that.’

‘If your da could see you today!’

Maisie was better at spotting half-answers. ‘Well, don’t stand over the garden wall. Come in and tell us about the wide world.’

Brendan shooshed with his antique hands. ‘Maisie Mickledeen, give our god-daughter a chance to catch her breath before plying her with liquor. Mo here’ll no doubt be wanting to get straight up to Aodhagan. The wide world can wait a few hours.’

‘Come by then later, Mo, or whenever, so. Eamonn O’Driscoll’s boy is back with his accordion, and Father Wally’s organising a lock-in.’

Lock-ins at The Green Man. I was home. ‘Maisie, don’t lock-ins need the odd night when you actually close at the legal time? And a lock to lock?’

‘Desist your logification right now, Mo! You’re back on Clear now. It’s only sheep, fish and the weather here. Leave your relativity back in Baltimore, if you please. And if John brings his harp I’ll crack open my last bottle of Kilmagoon. Mind how you go.’

‘Mowleen Muntervary, you are an eight-year-old aberration who will be lashed by devils with nettles in hell until your bottom is covered with little lumps that you will scratch until they bleed! Do you want that to happen?’

My memory of Miss Thorpe veers towards an eyebrow mite through an electron microscope. Shiny, spikey, many-eyed. Why are primary schoolteachers either Brontëesque angels or Dickensian witches? Do they teach black and white so much that they become black or white?

‘I asked you a question, and I did not hear an answer! Is it your wish to be damned as a liar?’

‘No, Miss Thorpe.’

‘Then tell me how you got your grubby mitts on the algebra test answers!’

‘I did them myself !’

‘If there is one thing in this world that I loathe more than little boys who fib, it is little girls who fib! I shall be forced to write to your father, telling him that his daughter is a fork-tongued viper! You’re going to be shamed in your own village!’

A toothless threat. No Clear Islander took a non-Gaelic-speaking teacher seriously.

There was a trail of these exposé letters, all the way to Cork Girls’ Grammar School. When my da came back at the weekend he used to read them out to Ma in a funny English accent that crippled us with laughter. ‘It is inconceivable that your daughter scored a hundred per cent in this examination honestly. Cheating is a serious transgression...’

Da was a boatyard contractor who spent the week travelling between Cork and Baltimore, supervising work and dealing with buyers from as far as Dublin. He’d fallen in love with my mother, a Clear Island girl, and was married in St Ciaran’s church by a middle-aged priest called Father Wally.

These days the primary school kids are taught in English and Gaelic in Portacabins down in the harbour. The older ones go on the St Fachtna to a school in Schull that has its own planetarium. Miss Thorpe went to propagate her Manichean principles in poor multi-shafted African countries. Bertie Crow stores hay in the old school house now.

If you look in through the window, that’s what you see: hay.

I told the Texan I would reconsider my resignation over the weekend. I drove to the bank, and withdrew enough US dollars in cash for the manager to invite me into the back office for coffee while they checked me out. Driving back to the chalet, I caught myself glancing into the mirror every fifteen seconds. Paranoia must often begin as a nasty game. I phoned John to ask his advice. ‘A thorny one,’ said John. ‘But should you decide to,’ he switched to Gaelic, ‘take an unscheduled sabbatical, try to get back to Clear for my birthday.’ John usually hid his advice in its wrapping. ‘And remember that I love you very much.’

I packed briefly, and left a note on the table asking Daniella to look after my books and plants. The hardware, like the chalet and the car, belonged to Light Box. I downloaded my hard disks onto the CDs I planned to take, erased everything else, and emptied zoos of my most virulent viruses on the disks I’d leave behind. My farewell present to Heinz.

How do you disappear? I’d made particles disappear, but I’d never disappeared myself. I would have to watch myself through my pursuers’ eyes, find blindspots, and move into those blindspots. I telephoned my usual travel agent, and asked for a flight to Petersburg in three days’ time, no matter the cost, to be paid by credit card. I e-mailed the only web site in Equatorial Guinea, telling them that Operation Cheese was Green. I went out for a stroll, and found a Belgian yoghurt lorry in which to chuck my cylindrical chicken switch.

Then I sat in my window seat and watched the waterfall, as the evening thickened.

When it was dark I began the long drive north on the Berlin autobahn.

I could see the beginning.

The track has wildflowers growing down the middle. ‘Aodhagan Croft’, says the sign, painted by Liam. Another sign swings underneath: ‘home-made ice cream’, painted by me. Planck dozes in the late sun. The windows in the house are open. The yellow sou’wester in the porch, the watering can, Planck’s lead and harness, the wellington boots, the rows of herb pots. John comes out of the house: he hasn’t heard me yet. I walk to the vegetable garden. Feynman sees me, and bleats through his beard. Schroedinger leaps onto the mailbox to get a better view. Planck thumps her tail a couple of times before getting up to bark. Lazy tyke.

My journey ends here. I am out of west to run to.

John turns. ‘Mo!’

‘Who else are you expecting, John Cullin?’

A latch clicks in the murk and I fold upright and where the hell am I? I slip and judder. What ceiling, what window? Huw’s? The poky hotel in Beijing? The Amex Hotel in Petersburg, is there a ferry to catch? Helsinki? The black book! Where’s the black book! Slowly now Mo, slowly... you’ve forgotten something, something secure. The rain drumming on the glass, fat fingertips of European rain. The smooth edges, unclutteredness, the windchime, you recognise that windchime, don’t you, Mo? The bruises down your side are still aching, but aching with healing. A man downstairs is singing Van Morrison’s ‘The way young lovers do’ in a way that only one man you know sings Van Morrison, and it definitely isn’t Van Morrison.

I felt happiness that I’d forgotten the feel of.

And there’s the black book on the dressing table, where you put it last night.

On John’s side of the bed was a John-shaped hollow. I rolled into it, the cosiest place on Earth. I twitched open the curtain with my toe. A sulky sky, not worth getting up for yet.

When did I become so jittery? That night I left for Berlin? Or is it just getting old, my organs getting fussier, until one of them says ‘I quit!’ I belly-flopped back into the shallows of sleep. A lonely horn sounded, from one of my ma’s gramophone records, a cargo ship out in the Celtic Sea, a memory junk across Kowloon harbour. We rounded the west cape of Sherkin Island, my black book and I, and after a trip of twelve thousand miles I could see the end. Would they be waiting here? They let me get this far. No, I got this far myself. The pillow of John, John the pillow, St John, hemp, smoke, mahogany sweat and deeper fruits deeper down, my heart jolting, hauling carriages, grasslands rising and falling, years and years of them, Custard from Copenhagen, inured to loneliness, gazing out of the window, I wonder what happened to him, I wonder what happened to all of them, this wondering is the nature of matter, each of us a loose particle, an infinity of paths through the park, probable ones, improbable ones, none of them real until observed whatever real means, and for something so solid matter contains terrible, terrible, terrible expanses of nothing, nothing, nothing...

Technology is repeatable miracles. Air travel, for instance. Thirty thousand feet below our hollow winged nail, it’s early morning in Russia. A track runs snowy hills and black lakes, drawn with a wonky ruler.

My fellow passengers are oblivious to the forces that infuse matter and carry thought. They don’t know how our Boeing 747’s velocity increases our mass and slows time, while our distance from the Earth’s gravitational centre has speeded up time, relative to those asleep in the farmhouses we are passing over. None has heard of quantum cognition.

I can’t sleep. My skin feels stretched and saggy. I bring my calculator onto airplanes to pass the time. It’s a chunky one that Alain borrowed from the Paris lab. It can do a quintillion decimal places. To pass the time I work out the odds of us three hundred and sixty passengers all being here. Long odds. It takes me all the way to Kyrgistan.

Anything to distract me from the near future.

A Chinese schoolgirl on her way back to Hong Kong is asleep next to me. She is around the age when lucky young women transform into beautiful swans. At her age Mo Muntervary transformed into a spotty gannet. Now I’m a wrinkled gannet. A dinosaur movie is on the screen, scaley violence in silence. My throat is dry with recycled air. I feel a headache coming on. Cryptish lighting, orthodontic decor. Where is the sun, which way is the world spinning? And what the hell have I got myself into?

The second time I awoke, footsteps vibrated the plank of sleep. I knew exactly where I was this time. How long? Two minutes or two hours? Real footsteps, running on gravel, measured and bold, with a right to be here. I lifted the curtain by an eighth of an inch, and I saw a young man jogging through a tunnel of drizzle straight to Aodhagan.

Stone the crows. My son is a man. I felt proud and piqued. His duffle coat swung open. Dark jeans, boots, his father’s uncontrollable hair. Feynman stared from his paddock, munching, and Planck jumped up, wagging.

‘Mo!’ John shouted from down below. ‘It’s Liam!’

A door banged. Liam still closes doors like a baby elephant.

I put on John’s bat-cloak dressing gown. ‘I’m coming down! And John?’

‘What?’

‘Happy birthday, you scabby pirate!’

‘I’ve never had a better one!’

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.’

‘Hello, 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 cockroaches on its payroll they’ll never find you.’

‘In my limited experience the CIA has a lot of cockroaches 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 glass. 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.

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 bumfluff 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 bassoon.

‘Liam—’ I said at exactly the same time, my voice a flautist’s mistake.

‘Oh for the love of God 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 god-knows-where in my 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 shining 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 passes.’

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 spaceman 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 been and what have you 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 passes. 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 passport made, for only fifty US dollars.

I watched the television war. I watched the weaponry analysed, 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 gatecrashing 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 nobody 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 chink 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 shirt. 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 nobody 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.

In the days and weeks following my routine grew saggier but regular. I got up around one in the afternoon and ate at a dim sung restaurant across the alleyway. The place was owned by an old albino man. I sat in the corner with The Economist, Legal Advisor, a Delia Smith cookery book, or whatever else was lying around Huw’s apartment. On lucky days the shoeshiner who was the de facto postman for our tenement had a jiffy bag addressed to Huw with a tape from John. I listened to them in my dim sung corner on Huw’s Walkman, over and over. Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he’d just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there would be some Liam. The summer fayre. The Fastnet Race. I would unfold my map of Clear Island. Those tapes prised the lid off homesickness and rattled out the contents, but always at the bottom was solace.

At the end of the afternoon I sat down at the rickety desk and picked up from where I had left off in the early hours. I worked in isolation: e-mailing any of the handful of people alive who could have contributed was too dangerous. It was liberating: not having to be accountable to Heinz Formaggio and other cretins. I had my father’s fountain pen, my black book, a box of CDs containing data from every particle lab experiment ever conducted, and thousands of dollars of computer equipment bought from a Sikh gentleman more resourceful than Light Box Procurement. Compared to Kepler, who plotted the ellipsoids of Mars with little more than a goose quill, I had it easy.

There were wrong turnings. I had to jettison matrix mechanics in favour of virtual numbers, and my doomed attempt to amalgamate the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox with Cadwalladr’s behavioural model set me back weeks. It was the loneliest time in my life. As chess players or writers or mystics know, the pursuit of insight takes you deep into the forest. Days were I’d just gaze at the steam rising from my coffee, or stains on the wall, or a locked door. Days were I’d find the next key in the steam or the stains or the lock.

By July all the footprints of Einstein, Bohr and Sonada were behind me.

The black book was filling up.

I was still talking. Liam’s toast had gone cold. A helicopter flew over.

What is Liam thinking?

Is it, ‘Why can’t I have normal parents?’

Is it, ‘Will she never stop?’

‘Is my ma a madwoman?’

It makes me sad that I can’t read my son’s thoughts. There again, it’s right this way. He’s eighteen, now. I missed his birthday again. Where will I be for the next one?

‘Well don’t stop there, Ma. You’re just getting to the good bit.’

The strong force that stops the protons of a nucleus hurtling away from one another; the weak force that keeps the electrons from crashing into the protons; electromagnetism, which lights the planet and cooks dinner; and gravity, which is the most down to Earth. From before the time the universe was the size of a walnut to its present diameter, these four forces have been the statute book of matter, be it the core of Sirius or the electrochemical ducts of the brains of students in the lecture theatre at Belfast. Bored, intent, asleep, dreaming, in receding tiers. Chewing pencils or following me.

Matter is thought, and thought is matter. Nothing exists that cannot be synthesised.

Summer. Huw came back late most nights, to snatch a few hours of sleep before returning to his office. A securities firm had crashed, and the effects were rippling out. Sometimes a week went by and apart from noticing the toothpaste tube depleting we were barely aware of one another. On Sundays, however, we always dressed up and went out to dinner somewhere expensive, but low-key. I didn’t want to risk meeting his colleagues. Lying is a skill I have never mastered.

I often worked all night. Hong Kong never really quietens down, the sunlight just switches off for a few hours. Huw’s snores, the godalmighty clatter of Kowloon’s sweat shops, that gigantic bicycle pump, the eye of the electric fan and moth wings on the computer screen ushered in the quantum mathematics of sentience.

Three sharp knocks on John’s door and a mantrap snapped shut, I’d jumped up, spilt my tea and was crouched in the stair doorway, poised to run — where? Only one door — I would have to jump from the second floor and run for it across the meadows. Great idea, Mo. Dislocate a hip. Liam didn’t know what was going on. John was working it out, my panic bashing its head on his defences.

‘It’s okay, Ma—’ Liam began.

I sliced the air. ‘Sssssh!’

Liam showed me the palms of his hands like he was calming a scared animal. ‘It’s either Father Wally, Maisie or Red come to milk Feynman...’

I shook my head. They’d have knocked once, if at all, and walked in.

‘Who was on the St Fachtna with you this morning? Any Americans?’

There was another rattle of knocking. ‘Hello?’ A woman. Not Irish, not English.

I put my finger over my lips, and tiptoed up the stairs. They creaked.

A mouth to the letterbox. ‘G’day? Anyone home?’

‘Morning to you,’ said John. ‘Just a moment...’

I slid into the bedroom and looked for somewhere to hide the black book. Where, Mo? Under the mattress? Eat it?

I heard John opening the door. ‘Sorry to keep you.’

‘No worries. Sorry for the bother. I’m walking to this row of stones on the map here. Map-reading was never my strong point.’

‘The stone row? Piece of cake. Go back down the drive, turn left, and just follow the sign to Roe’s bridge. All the way until the road peters out. Then you’ll see it. Unless the mist has other plans.’

‘Thanks a million. Too bad about this rain, eh? It’s like winter back home.’

How can John be so calm? ‘Where is home? New Zealand?’

‘That’s right! Halfmoon Bay, Stewart Island, south of the South Island. Know it?’

‘Can’t say I do. ’Fraid the weather’s a law unto itself, here. Tropical rainstorms, raining frogs... Gales later though, the fishing forecast said earlier. Winter’s around the corner.’

‘Just my luck. Say now, you’re a lovely dog! A him or a her?’

‘A her. Planck.’

‘As in thick as a?’

‘As in the physicist who discovered why you can sit in front of a fire and not be incinerated by the ultraviolet catastrophe.’

Nervous laugh. ‘Oh, right, that Planck. Mild-mannered beastie for an island dog.’

‘It’s her job. She’s my guide dog.’

The usual awkwardness. I relaxed. A pursuer would know about John. Unless she was just a good actress. I tensed up.

‘You mean, er, you’re...’

‘...as a bat. A lot blinder than a bat, actually. I’m unequipped with sonar.’

‘Strewth... there was I... I’m sorry.’

‘No need.’

‘Well, I’d better get to the row of stones before the gales blow ’em over.’

‘Take your time. They’ve been there three thousand years. Mind how you go.’

‘’Bye. Thanks again.’

I watched her walk down the drive. A youngish woman with red hair and a lemon raincoat. She looked over her shoulder, and I pulled away from the window. Could she have noticed the third coffee cup? I heard Liam and John talking in hushed voices downstairs. I watched the mist drifting in from the Calf Islands.

The sky over the Mount Gabriel was beaten dark and threatening. Liam and I were making a stew with some late turnips from the garden. John was tuning his harp. The stew bubbled in the pot.

Liam crumbled in a stock cube. ‘What are you going to do, Ma?’

‘Add some more garlic.’

‘You know what I’m talking about. Are they coming for you?’

‘Aye, I think they are.’

‘And are you going to go with them?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why did you come back to Clear if you know they’ll track you here?’

‘Because I needed to see you pair.’

‘You need a plan.’

‘By all means I need a plan.’

‘So, what are your options?’

Liam sounded like my father. ‘One. Burn the black book and turn quantum cognition to ash. Change my name to Scarlett O’Hara, plant beans, keep bees for the rest of my life, and hope that the CIA is too stupid to look for me on the island of my birth. Two. Spend the rest of my life backpacking in hot countries, wearing sandals and tie-dye trousers. Three. Go and live in a place in Texas that is not on maps, earn vast prestige and money by accelerating the new arms race fifty years, and see my son and my husband only under escort to ensure I don’t defect.’

Liam chopped his onion deftly. ‘Aye, that’s a thorny one.’

Kowloon brewed, stewed and simmered. My nonlocality virtual equations were holding. My peaceful gone-to-earth exile’s life couldn’t last.

I remember the moment it ended. A gecko had appeared on the screen. Its tongue flickered like electricity. Hello, tiny life-form of star compost, did you know that your lizardly life, too, is billiarded this way and that by quantum scissors, papers and stones? That your particles exist in a time-froth of little bridges and holes forever going back and around and under itself ? That the universe is the shape of a doughnut, and that if you had a powerful enough telescope you would see the tip of your tail?

Do you care?

Male shouting flared up from nowhere, and exploded in seesawing Cantonese. Women pitched in a couple of octaves higher. Tipped-over furniture walloped. The lampshade in my room swayed.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Huw stumbled through in his Daffy Duck boxer shorts and Mr Mole glasses, tripping over his Indonesian drum kit. ‘Fuck.’

A gun fired! I jumped as if it had gone off in my pocket. ‘Sweet Jesus!’

The whole building was quiet as death.

Huw checked that the bolts and chain were securely fastened.

The gecko was long gone.

A sickening sense that this was coming for me. I was gnawing my knuckles.

Thunder fell headlong down the stairs — and stopped. There were at least three sets of footfalls. Huw picked up a baseball bat. I picked up a scale plaster model of John Coltrane, and with utter calmness I knew that I had never been this petrified in all my life. Very luckily for us, the thunder carried on down. Huw went towards the window but I instinctively pulled him back. His eyes were astonished. ‘Fuck,’ he said, a third time. The only three swear words I’d ever heard from Huw.

The wart on my thumb was growing.

The phone rang. Leave me alone. Leave me alone.

John was nearest. ‘Hello?’

My throat was dry.

‘Tamlin...’

Tamlin Sheehy. Calm down, Mo. No newcomers to Clear Island today.

‘Yes, Liam tied the tarpaulin down. They’ll be fine. Thanks for asking. She would, would she? Okay... Mind how you go...’

John cupped the receiver. ‘Hey loverboy, Bernadette wants to murmur sweet nothings.’

‘Da! She’s frightmare! Don’t you dare!’

‘Don’t be rotten. You’ve got the lure of the exotic. You’ve been to Switzerland.’

John smiled twistedly and spoke back into the receiver. ‘Just a mo there, Bernadette, he’s just coming. He was in the shower. He’s just towelling himself dry for...’

Liam half-snarled, half-hissed, and took the phone into the hallway, shutting the door on the cord.

We listened to the radio over dinner.

‘Have you noticed,’ said John, ‘how countries call theirs “sovereign nuclear deterrents”, but call the other countries’ ones “weapons of mass destruction”?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

The wind rose and fell like mountains at sea. The glass rattled. Liam yawned, so did I. ‘One game to me, one game to you. Will Feynman be okay?’

‘He will. He huddles down behind his boulder. Where’s your da?’

‘In his study, meditating.’

Liam started putting away the Scrabble. ‘It’s going to be a harsh winter, Maisie was telling me. Long-range weather forecast.’

‘Maisie? Has she got satellite TV installed?’

‘No, her bees told her.’

‘Ah, the bees.’

The Chinese policeman was unexpectedly tall and civil. A lieutenant from the old Prince of Wales guard, he knew about Huw’s work. He wrote down our versions of the raid in his note book, and sipped iced tea. An ink-devil of sweat soaked itself into his shirt.

‘I should tell you that the burglars wanted to know where were hidden the gwai los. Your neighbours said there no gwai los.’

‘Before or after the gun was fired?’ I asked.

‘After. They lied for you.’

Huw puffed out his cheeks. ‘What are you thinking, Officer?’

‘Two possibilities. One. They thought the apartment of gwai los had better things to steal. Two. Mr Llewellyn, you investigating the accounts of powerful companies. Might they include some Triad links?’

‘Show me a company in Hong Kong that doesn’t have Triad links.’

‘Foreigners don’t live in neighbourhoods like this, especially white ones. Discovery Bay is more secure.’

I went into the kitchenette. In the opposite tenement the blinds were rolling down as the excitement subsided. Eyes everywhere. Eyes, eyes.

I remembered my conversation with the Texan. I knew who the ‘burglars’ were and what they had come for. Next time they wouldn’t mistake the British, American and Chinese system of labelling floors.

I hadn’t touched a piano since Switzerland. I played a passable aria from the Goldberg Variations.

Liam played a gorgeous ‘In a Sentimental Mood’.

John half-improvised, half-remembered. ‘This one’s the crow on the wall... this one’s the wind turbine... this one’s...’

‘Totally random notes?’ suggested Liam.

‘No. It’s the music of chance.’

‘The wind’s really getting up! Maybe there’ll be no boats tomorrow either, Ma?’

‘Maybe so. So tell me about Uni, Liam.’

‘They’ve got some cool electron microscopes. I’m doing my first-year thesis on superliquids, and I’ve been playing synths in a band, and—’

‘—deflowering maidens,’ butted in John through a mouthful of sausage. ‘According to Dennis.’

‘It’s not fair, Ma,’ Liam turned red as a beetroot. ‘He speaks to Professor Dannan once a week.’

‘As I have done for the last twenty years. Why should I stop just because he’s your tutor?’

Liam harrumphed, and walked over to the window. ‘It looks like the end of the world out there.’

Schroedinger came in through the cat flap, and looked around hypercritically.

‘What, cat?’ asked Liam.

Schroedinger chose John’s lap in which to exact tribute.

The storm battered the island.

‘I’m a shade concerned about our Kiwi visitor.’ John picked up the telephone. ‘Mrs Dunwallis? This is John. I’m just phoning to check whether or not your Kiwi visitor got back to the hostel safe and sound... she called in here earlier, asking for directions to the stone row, with the gales, I was worried... Are you sure? Of course you’re sure... No idea. Mrs Cuchthalain’s at Roe Bridge? Sure... will do.’

‘What’s up, Da?’

‘No New Zealanders at the Youth Hostel.’

‘She must have just been a day tripper, then.’

‘Billy wouldn’t risk taking St Fachtna over to Baltimore in this weather.’

‘She’s still on the island then. She must have taken shelter in the village.’

‘Aye. There’s a logical explanation.’

I felt hollow. I was afraid there was a very logical explanation.

John and I were in our firelit bedroom. Liam was in the bath having a long soak, after e-mailing a girl in Dublin whose name we couldn’t tease out of him. John massaged my feet as thunder galloped by. I watched the sphinxes and the faces and flowers in the bedroom’s fireplace. The physics and chemistry of fire only add to its poetry. This way of living was so normal to Clear Islanders. Mo, why are evenings like this so rare for you?

I am the ancient mariner: that black book is my albatross.

‘What am I going to do, John? When they get here?’

‘Mo, let’s cross that one when we get to it.’

‘I don’t even know if I should cross it at all.’

On the third day I knew where I was before I opened my eyes. The black book was safe. Yesterday’s storms were long gone, the early sunlight lit the curtains, ending its twenty-six-minute journey on the jiggleable electrons in my retina. The wind was brisk, the sky was bright and cloud shadows slid over Roaringwater Sound and the three Calf Islands. Planck was barking. Thousands of Arab children were gambolling into the sea, steam hissing off their burns. A noise on the stairs made me turn around. The Texan filled the doorframe. He clicked the safety catch off and aimed the gun at the black book, then at me. ‘We need Quancog to rise again, Dr Muntervary.’ He winked at me as he pulled the trigger.

I lay there for twenty minutes, calming down. The early sunlight lit the curtains.

John’s eyeballs rolled under his eyelids, seeing something I couldn’t.

Our very first morning together in this house, this room, this bed, was our first morning as husband and wife. Twenty years ago! Brendan had constructed the bed, and Maisie had painted the Michaelmas daisies along the headboard. The bedding was from Mrs Dunwallis, who’d stuffed the pillows from her own geese. Aodhagan Croft itself was a wedding present from John’s Aunt Cath, who had gone to live with Aunt Triona in Baltimore. No electricity, no telephone, no sewage tank. My own parents’ house in the sycamore trees was still standing, but the floorboards and rafters had rotted right through, and we didn’t have the money to reverse dereliction.

Besides Aodhagan we had John’s harp, my doctorate, a crate of books that had been my da’s library, and a cartload of tiles and whitewash lugged up from the harbour by Freddy Doig’s horse. My job at Cork University didn’t begin until the autumn term. I’ve never felt such freedom since, and I know I never will again.

Down in the kitchen the telephone rang. Leave me alone, leave me alone.

To my surprise Liam was already up and had answered it before the third ring. ‘Oh, hi, Aunt Maisie... Yeah, they’re still in bed, on a morning like this, can you believe it? Bone idle or what? Uni’s fine... Which one? Nah, she’s history, I knocked that one on the head weeks ago... Not literally, no. Right, I’ll tell ’em when they drag themselves down. Okay.’

I left John asleep. I hobbled downstairs, the stairs and my ankles creaking. ‘Morning, First-Born.’

‘Only-Born. That was Aunt Maisie. She told me to say “Kilmagoon” to you. She’s cleaning the pipes in the bar, but will be going to Minnaunboy to cut Sylvester’s hair later. Nicky O’Driscoll’s privy got blown away in the gale, and Maire Doig caught a monster conger eel. She’s suffering from gossip deprivation. Sleep okay?’

‘Like a log.’

A pause while Liam worked up to something.

‘Ma — are you going to tell everyone about the Americans?’

‘I think it’s best not to.’

‘When are they going to come?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Sooner or later?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Then when are we going to hide out somewhere?’

‘You’re going back to university, my boy.’

‘And you?’

‘As you astutely observed, I’m not James Bond. I can’t go on hiding. The only places I would be safe from the Americans are places more dangerous than Saragosa. All I can do is wait for them to come.’

Liam spooned up some milk and dribbled it down into his bowl.

‘They can’t just abduct an Irish citizen! And you’re not exactly nobody, either. It would be an international incident. The media would kick up too much fuss.’

‘Liam, they are the most powerful people on the planet and they want what is in my head and my black book. Neither international law nor BBC Radio would come into it.’

Liam’s forehead knotted up, like it used to before a tantrum. ‘But... how are we supposed to live like this? Do we just sit around waiting for you to be got?’

‘I wish I had an answer for you, love.’

‘It’s not fair!’

‘No.’

The legs of his chair scraped as he stood up. ‘Well, damn it all, Ma!’

I didn’t know what to say.

‘I’m going to go and feed the chickens.’ He put his duffle coat over his pyjamas and went out.

I put the kettle on, and waited for it to whistle.

The grandfather clock’s pendulum grated like a spade digging far below.

Eighteen years ago I was flat on my back in the bedroom, with Liam tunnelling out of my womb. A windtunnel of agony! I didn’t want to give birth on Clear Island — I was a research lecturer acquainted with the latest medical technology. That very day I was leaving for Cork to stay with Bella and Alain near a shiny hospital with a cheerful midwife from Jamaica, but Liam had other ideas. Even today he’s patient only until he’s bored. So instead of my gleaming ward I had Aodhagan’s bedroom, my mother, Maisie, an icon of St Bernadette, some anti-faerie herbs, towels and steaming kettles. John was smoking downstairs with Brendan, and Father Wally was on hand with his holy water.

When he was out, as I lay there unstitched, the pain seeping away, Maisie held up Liam! This alien parasite, glistening in mucus? Laugh or cry? Birth had come visiting, just as death will, and everything was perfectly clear. My mother, Maisie, St Bernadette and I shared a few moments, postponing the clodhopping hullabaloo. Maise washed Liam in a tin bath.

It was noon. I felt I was cradling little Apollo.

Liam fed the hook into the mouth of the earthworm. The hook slid deeper into its gut as it squirmed. ‘Chew on that, my hermaphrodite.’

‘How can you do that and not bring your breakfast up?’

The sea breathed deeply in, and deeply out.

‘Ah well, Mam. Life’s a bitch, then you die.’

He got up and cast off. I lost sight of the float until the plop sounded. My eyesight is definitely getting worse.

Seals were basking between the rock pools. The bull hauled himself into the sea, and sank from sight for thirty seconds. Thirty yards out his head appeared, reminding me of Planck.

‘You must have fished with live bait when you were a girl, Ma?’

‘I usually had my head in books. Your grandmother was the real fisherman of the family. She’d be out before dawn on mornings like these. I must have told you a dozen times.’

‘You never have. What about Grandpa?’

‘His pleasure lay in weaving extraordinary lies.’

‘What like?’

‘One time he said King Cuchulainn had given Bonnie Prince Charlie all his gold to look after before he went mad and turned into a newt. Bonnie Prince Charlie, running from Napoleon Bonaparte, hid the gold under a stone on Clear Island, and if we looked hard enough we’d be sure to find it. We spent a whole summer, me and the Docherty twins. Then Roland Davitt pointed out the chronological inconsistencies.’

‘What did you say to Grandpa?’

‘I asked him why he’d lied.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He told me that no scientist based her research on secondhand data without checking its veracity beforehand, using the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the village school.’

A motor boat crossed the sound. I looked through the binoculars.

‘It’s okay, Ma. It’s only Daibhi O’Bruadair raising his lobster pots.’

Mo, don’t be so jumpy! God knows when you’ll next have a free morning with Liam. Could be tomorrow, could be years from now.

For a little while we said nothing, Liam standing there fishing, and me lying on the warm rock. I listened to the waves breathe through the shingle.

The rain was falling onto the roofs of Skibbereen, coming out of the guttering in great gurgling arcs and slapping onto the pavements. The nursing home attendant poured one cup of tea in the china teacup. It had a wide brim to hasten thermal equilibrium and a mousepaw-sized handle to hasten spillage. ‘I’m sorry the head matron couldn’t be here to see you herself, Dr Muntervary... but visitors usually let us know in advance that they’ll be paying a call.’

‘It’s just a flying visit.’

The nurse and I caught each other searching the other’s face and we both looked down. I could imagine the Texan speaking to her: ‘I’m an old friend of Mo and John... if Mo shows up, give me a bell. I’d love to surprise her.’

We looked at my ma.

‘Mrs Muntervary? Your daughter’s come.’ I suspected the softness in the attendant’s voice only appeared when visitors came to tea.

I looked around the room. ‘Very nice in here...’ What rubbish.

‘Yes,’ said the attendant. ‘We do our best.’ More rubbish. ‘Well, I’ll leave you for a little while. I have to supervise the crochet class, to make sure there are no upsets with the needles.’

Everything in the room was magnolia. Anonymity is grey, forgetting is magnolia.

I looked at my mother. Lucy Eileen Muntervary. Are you somewhere, looking at us both but unable to signal, or are you nowhere now? When I visited at the end of winter you had been upset. You remembered my face but not who it belonged to.

Wigner maintains that human consciousness collapses one lucky universe into being from all of the possible ones. Had my mother’s universe now uncollapsed? Were cards flying back across the baize back into the dealer’s pack?

My mother blinked.

‘Ma...’ A voice used to address a saint believed in only when needed.

‘Ma, if you can hear me...’ Now I’m opening a seance.

Why are you putting yourself through this, Mo?

Without where I am from and who I am from, I am nothing, even if the glass is gone and conifers are growing through where the roof should be. All those wideworlders in transit, all those misplaced, thrown-away people who know as little as they care about their roots — how do they do it? How do they know who they are?

My ma blinked.

‘Ma, do you remember dancing with Da in the parlour?’

I persuaded myself that she was enjoying the patter of raindrops on the windowsill. We watched the waterflower-fireworks until the attendant returned.

Over Lios O Moine comes Father Wally, freewheeling on his tricycle, his habit flapping behind him in the wind. I watch him getting nearer and larger, and find myself calculating a parallax matrix. We wave. Liam is still concentrating, swishing his fishing line from time to time. I can hear Father Wally’s tricycle now, a rusty brigand on coasters. He dismounts cowboy-style, standing on one pedal and jumping as it cruises to a crash. His face is red from the exercise and the wind, his hair fine and white from age.

‘Morning to the pair o’ye! You survived the gales, then. Your eye’s looking better, Mo. I called into Aodhagan to see about saving my bishop. He told me you’d be here. It’s a fair old spot to see dolphins. Fish biting, Liam?’

‘Not yet, Father. They’ve probably just had breakfast.’

‘Shufty up on our blanket, Father. I’ve got a thermos of tea and a thermos of coffee.’

‘I’ll go with your tea, there, Mo. Coffee is fine for the body, but tea is the drink of the soul.’

‘I read a few weeks back,’ said Liam, ‘that tea was first processed accidentally in the holds of long-distance clippers from India. It took so long, and got so hot, that the crates of green tea started to ferment. And when they opened the crates at Bristol or Dublin or Le Havre, the stuff we call tea is what they found. But it was all a mistake, to begin with.’

‘I wasn’t knowing that,’ said Father Wally, ‘so many things there are to know. Most things happen because of mistakes.’

‘Can I leave you with Ma, Father Wally? I want to cast off further down. I think the seals might be scaring the fishing off.’

‘Even Jesus tended to put fishing first.’

After the upstairs raid, I knew I had to leave right then. Huw tried to dissuade me, and talked about coincidences and overreacting, but there was no way I’d risk bringing those people into his life, and he knew I was right. We spoke in whispers as I packed. I judged it too dangerous to try to leave Hong Kong by the airport. Huw walked me to a big hotel near his office. I said goodbye to my only friend east of Lake Geneva. I checked in with my real name, and then took a taxi to another hotel, where I checked in with my fake passport.

The following day I lay low. From the travel office in the hotel I obtained a visa for China and a train ticket with my own compartment to Beijing. When I was a girl, I dreamed of such journeys. Now I could only dream of its end.

Tomorrow, mainland Asia would swallow me whole.

Father Wally and I sat nursing our cups of tea, watching Liam fish in front of creation. Mount Gabriel rose on the peninsula to the blue north.

‘Fine lad,’ said Father Wally. ‘Your da and ma would be proud of him.’

‘Do you know Father, in the last seventeen years, I’ve spent only five years and nine months with Liam? That’s only twenty-six per cent. Am I crazy? It’s like John and I have been divorced. I didn’t mean it to be like that. I sometimes worry I’ve deprived him of his roots.’

‘Does he look like a victim of deprivation to you?’

All six feet of Liam, because of John and me.

St Fachtna crossed the water towards Baltimore. I tried not to see it. ‘Have a digestive biscuit, Father.’

‘Don’t mind if I do, thanking you. Remember the day Liam was born?’

‘I was thinking about it this morning, funnily enough.’

‘I’ve christened some ugly babies in my time, Mo, but...’

I laughed. ‘I wish John could see him now.’

‘John sees better than most. He’s a hell-bound atheist and slippery as an eel when it comes to the Russian Bishop’s Switchblade, but he’s got the patience of Job.’

‘He’s got a better choice in friends than Job.’

‘Folks with most to complain about seldom complain most.’

‘John says, self-pity’s the first step to despair for blind people.’

‘Aye, I can see that, but none the less...’

Father Wally wanted to say something else, so I waited and watched a flotilla of puffins. Across the bay, in the harbour, sheets were drying in the wind. I found myself calculating how long one Homer Missile with a Quancog module would take to decide where the optimum point of impact would be — thirty nanoseconds. Inside eight seconds the hillside would be a fireball.

‘Mo,’ began Father Wally, making a tent with his hands. ‘John’s told me nothing. But that tells me a lot. Then there’s the chain of people passing on tapes to John and back all year, you know how people jump to conclusions—’

‘I can’t tell you, Father. I want to, but I can’t. I can’t even tell you why I can’t.’

‘Mo, I’m not asking you to discuss any of that secret hoipolloy. I just wanted to say that you’re one of us, and we stick by our own.’

Before I could answer mechanical thunder scattered the sheep and ripped the air. We watched the fighter plane fly off to the north. Liam waded back towards us.

‘Infernal things!’ growled Father Wally. ‘There’s been a spate of them recently. They’ve reopened the old army range over on Bear Island. Now we’re a Gaelic tiger we’re getting airs about power. Won’t we ever learn? Ireland, and power. Fine by themselves, but bring them together and it all goes wrong, like, like...’

‘Kiwi fruit and yoghurt,’ said Liam. ‘Bitter.’

‘We’ll be wanting our own satellites next, and nuclear bombs.’

‘Ireland pays into the European Space Agency already, doesn’t it Ma?’

‘There you go,’ said Father Wally. ‘We’re one of the last corners of Europe, and Clear Island is the last corner of Ireland, but it’s catching up with us, even here.’

Electrons in my brain are moving forwards and backwards in time, changing atoms, changing electrical charge, changing molecules, changing chemicals, carrying impulses, changing thoughts, deciding to have a baby, changing ideas, deciding to leave Light Box, changing theory, changing technology, changing computer circuitry, changing artificial intelligence, changing the projections of missiles whole segments of the globe away, and collapsing buildings onto people who have never heard of Ireland.

Electrons, electrons, electrons. What laws are you following?

John came down the road from Lios O’Moine with Planck.

‘Ahoy there Da!’ said Liam.

‘Liam? Caught lunch yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Eighteen years of devoted parenting, and all I get is “not yet”? Is your ma here?’

‘Present. And Father Wally.’

‘Just the man we need. Any chance of turning no fish and no bread into lunch?’

‘I confess, I stopped off at Ancient’s for contingency sandwich supplies...’

‘Aha! My kind of Papist!’

‘It’s only eleven-thirty,’ said Liam a little huffily, rethreading his fishing rod.

‘You’ve got until noon, son,’ said John.

John held my arm as we walked. He didn’t need to, his feet knew every inch of Clear Island: that’s why he moved back here permanently when his blindness closed in. He held my arm because he believed it made me feel like a teenager again, and he was right. We turned left hand at the only crossroads. Only the sounds of wind, gulls, sheep and waves floated on the silence.

‘Any clouds?’

‘Yes. Over Hare Island there’s a galleon one. Cumulonimbus Calvus.’

‘They the cauliflowers?’

‘Lungs.’

‘Camphor trees. What colours can you see?’

‘The fields are mossy green. The trees are bare, apart from a few hangers-on. The sky is map-sea blue. Pearly, mauve clouds. The sea is dark bottle blue. Ah, I’m an Atlantic woman, John. Leave the Pacific to the Pacificians. I rot if I’m left anywhere Pacific.’

‘One of the stupidest things that people say about being blind, is that it’s sadder to have been sighted once and to have lost it. I know colour! Are there any boats out today?’

‘The Oilean na ’nEan. And a beautiful yacht anchored off Middle Calf Island.’

‘I miss sailing.’

‘You’d only have to ask.’

‘I get seasick. Imagine being on a rollercoaster, blindfolded.’

‘Aye, fair enough.’ We walked on for a bit. ‘Where are you taking me?’

‘Father Wally had St Ciaran’s woodwork renovated. Everyone says it’s quite something.’

The last warm wind before winter. Way, way, away a skylark sang.

‘Mo, I was worried sick about you.’

‘I’m so sorry, my love. But as long as nobody could reach me, nobody could threaten me. And as long as nobody could threaten me, you and Liam were safe.’

‘I’m still worried sick.’

‘I know. And I’m still sorry.’

‘I just wanted you to know.’

‘Thanks.’ Even from John, tenderness made me tearful.

‘You were like a one-woman electron in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I either knew your position but not your direction, or I knew your direction but not your position. What’s that noise? A ten-foot sheep?’

‘Cows lumbering over to see if we’re going to milk them.’

‘Jerseys or Friesians?’

‘Brown ones.’

‘Noakes’s Jerseys.’

‘What wouldn’t I give to stay here like my mother and plant beans.’

‘How long until you started itching for your ninth-generation computers again?’

‘Well, maybe I’d write the odd paper while I was waiting for my beans to grow.’

Red Kildare’s mighty motorbike pulled up, spitting stones and smoke. Maisie was in the sidecar. ‘John! Mo!’ she had to yell over the engine. ‘Mo! Here’s a piece of bacon for your wart!’

Maisie put a thumb-sized thing wrapped into aluminium foil into my hand. ‘Rub it on your wart before nightfall and bury it, but don’t let anyone see or it won’t work. Red’s milked Feynman. See you at The Green Man later.’

I nodded at Red and Red nodded at me.

‘Mind how you go. Red! Frape it!’

The Norton roared away, Maise whooping and flapping her arms like a dragon.

The same pew, the same chapel, a Mo different and the same. I gazed up at the ceiling, and saw the bottom of a boat. I always imagined the chapel as the Ark on Ararat. A smell of new wood, ancient flagstones and prayer books. I closed my eyes, and imagined my mother, a prim woman, and my father, either side of me. I could suddenly smell my mother’s perfume, it was called ‘Mountain Lily’. My father smelt of tobacco, wheezing slightly as his large stomach rose and fell. He squeezed my hand, turned and smiled. I opened my eyes, suddenly wide awake. John was feeling his way around the organ stops, cleared his throat, and launched into ‘A Lighter Shade of Pale’.

Bars, shafts, clefs in stained glass.

‘John Cullin! An anthem of the shameless sixties in a house of God.’

‘If God can’t dig the spirituality of Procol Harum, that’s His loss.’

‘What’ll you do if Father Wally comes?’

‘Tell him it’s Pastoral in E minor by Fettuccine.’

‘Fettuccine’s a pasta!’

‘We skipped the last fandango...’

Naomh’s road led up to the highest point on the island. We took it very slowly. I guided John round potholes.

‘The wind turbine’s cracking round at a fair old rate.’

‘It is, John.’

‘The islanders still believe you were behind the turbine.’

‘I wasn’t! The study group chose Clear Island independently.’

‘Badger O’Connor was going to organise a “It’s an eyesore” petition to the Euro MP. Then people discovered they’d never have another electricity bill in their life. When the committee proposed Gillarney Island at the eleventh hour, Badger O’Connor organised a “Give us back our generator” petition.’

‘People said windmills and canals and locomotives were eyesores, I’m quite sure. When they are threatened with extinction, then people wax lyrical. There’s a couple of crows picking their way down the wall.’ I thought of two black-cloaked old ladies, beachcombing. They looked up at me in unison.

The buzz and whoosh of the wind generator grew as we neared it. If each rotation a new day, a new year, a new universe, its shadow a scythe of anti-matter... then—

I almost stepped into the black thing that was suddenly at my feet, the flies buzzing around it. ‘Yurgh...’

‘What?’ asked John. ‘Sheepshit?’

‘No... Argh! It’s fangy little dead bat with its face half-eaten away.’

‘Lovely.’

There was a stranger walking along the cliff path far below. She had binoculars. I didn’t tell John.

‘What are you thinking, Mo?’

‘While I was in Hong Kong I saw a man die.’

‘How did he die?’

‘I don’t know... he just collapsed, right in front of me. His heart, I guess. There’s this big silver Buddha who lives out on one of the outlying islands. There was a coach park around the base of the steps that lead up to it, with a few stalls. I’d bought a bowl of noodles, and was slurping them up in the shade. He was only a young man. I wonder why I thought of him? Big Silver things on island hills, maybe. The peculiar thing was, he seemed to be laughing.’

I lay entombed in a slab of rock, in an embryo curl.

Out of the wind. Hold your ear to the conch of time, Mo. The tomb had lain here for three thousand years. I imagined that I had too. Nobody knows how pre-Celtic people lacking iron technology could have hollowed out a block of granite in which to bury their dead warlord, but here it is. Nobody’s sure how they dragged this block, the size of a double bed and twice as thick, across from Blananarragaun, either.

John’s hairy legs dangled down in front of the entrance.

Beyond, dune grass waved, seahorses rode the breakers. Beyond the breakers were waves, all colours and shades of eyes, all the way to the sleeping giant.

As kids, we used to dare each other to sleep in here: Clear Island folklore said that people who slept in Ciaran’s tomb would turn into either a crow or a poet. Danny Waite did one night, but he turned into a mechanic, and married the daughter of the butcher of Baltimore.

I reached out and poked John’s knee-pit. He yelped.

‘You know, Cullin, I could handle being a crow right now. It’d be a no-questions-asked way out of my dilemma. No, I’m terribly sorry Heinz, Mr Texan, Mo Muntervary would love to teach your weapons to think but she’s gone looking for twigs and earthworms.’

‘I’d like to be a crow, too. But not a blind crow. I’d probably fly into the turbine. Will you come out of there? It’s morbid, curling up in a tomb just for kicks.’

‘More morbid things have happened here. I remember Whelan Scott telling stories about the mass of St Secaire being celebrated here.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You city slickers, you don’t know anything. It’s the Catholic Mass, said backwards, word by word, and the person whom the Mass is dedicated to dies by next midwinter.’

‘I bet that went down a bomb with Father Wally.’

‘Only the Pope can provide absolution.’

‘It’s amazing you became a scientist, growing up in the middle of all this.’

‘I became a scientist because I grew up in the middle of all this.’

Even time is not immune to time. Once the only times that mattered were the rhythms of the planet and the body. The first people on this island needed time four times a year: the solstices and the equinoxes, to avoid planting seed too early or too late. When the Church got here, it staked out Sundays, Christmases, Easter, and began colonising the year with Saints’ Days. The English brought short leases and tax deadlines. With the railway, the hours had to march in time. Now TV satellites beam the same 6 o’clock news everywhere at the same 6 o’clock. Science has been as busy splicing time into ever thinner slivers as it has matter. In my Light Box research on superconductors, I dealt in jiffies: there are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them in a second.

But you can no more measure the speed of time than you can bottle days. Clocks measure arbitrary meters of time, but not its speed. Nobody knows if time is speeding up, or slowing down. Nobody knows what it is. How much time is there in a day? Not how many hours, minutes, seconds: how much time do we have?

This day?

‘What’s the sandwich scenario, Mo?’

‘Ham and cheese; ham and tomato; cheese and tomato.’

‘And ham, cheese and tomato.’

‘How did you know?’

‘You’ve never noticed how you group sandwiches into Venn diagrams?’

‘Do I?’

‘It’s why I married you.’

I remembered the little knuckle of meat Maisie had given me for my wart. I took it out of its silver paper, resisted a fleeting temptation to pop it into my mouth, and rubbed it against my wart.

‘Excuse me a moment, John. I have to bury a little bit of meat.’

‘Maisie’s wart cure? Go ahead. I won’t peep, Scout’s honour.’

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

‘I haven’t thought about Physics for a whole thirty minutes.’

‘The old Clear Island magic. Is anyone looking?’

‘No. We have the whole hillside to ourselves. And the man in the afternoon moon. And Noakes’s Jerseys.’

‘Then come here, my ocean child, my buxom island wench...’

‘Buxom! John Cullin...’

We left The Green Man before teatime. John, Planck and me, walked back to Aodhagan. Liam standing on the pedals of his mountain bike.

‘So where did you learn to hold whiskey like that?’ I asked Liam.

‘Da.’

‘That’s scurrilous slander is that!’

We walked on, Planck the only one who could walk straight.

‘It’s a rare old sunset tonight, Da.’

‘Is it now? What colour is it?’

‘Red.’

‘What red?’

‘Inside of a watermelon red.’

‘Ah, that red. October red. That’s a rare old sunset.’

I’d left John by the gate sitting on a stone with Planck. The turf was pucked with hoofmarks and molehills. Liam cycled on ahead to give Schroedinger his dinner.

The garden was now a little forest. I was right, the roof had fallen in. I picked a way down what might have been the path. Were eyes behind the murk-glazed windows? The ivy on the walls rustled. Something inside clattered and flapped. Owls, bats, cats, bipeds up to their own business?

‘Hello,’ I said, on the doorless threshold. ‘Anyone there?’

My da collapsed with his silted-up heart, just here. With the deadly calm of a person who had seen the future, my ma told me to look after him while she bicycled down to the harbour to get Dr Mallahan.

Da had wanted to say something to me. I leant close. He spoke like he had a ton of bricks on his ribs. ‘Mo, be strong, you understand? And study hard, and don’t let your Gaelic lapse. It’s who you are.’

‘Are you going to die now?’

‘Aye, Mo,’ said my da, ‘and I can tell you, poppet, it’s an intriguing experience.’

It had been a neat little house, smelling of fresh air and fresh plaster and bleach. My da had tiled it himself one summer, with help from the Doig boys, Father Wally and Gabriel Fitzmaurice who drowned that same October. We’d made a huge bonfire from all the old thatch, down on the beach.

But any given system will decay from a complex order to a simpler condition. After my mother and I left Clear to enter the world of aunts on the mainland, storms and woodworm got to work. Other islanders needed building supplies themselves. My ma couldn’t face her ghosts, so she told everybody to help themselves.

Now twigs hold up a roof of twilight and early stars.

‘Mo!’ John is calling from over the fields. ‘Are you okay?’

No messages were left.

‘Yes,’ I shout back, zipping up my anorak.

John made a yawling noise as he stretched himself awake. A mild day, rarefied by wintriness. I heard helicopters. ‘Sleep well, my love?’ John hears smiles in voices.

He degummed his mouth with his tongue. ‘Aye. I had this dream. I was floating in a shallow sea in Panama, no idea why it was Panama, it just was. I could see the light on the inside of the waves up above, and around me little puffy clouds were moving. “That’s odd,” I thought. “You can’t have clouds under the sea.” And when I looked closer, the clouds were jellyfish, Christmas-tree light-coloured, all glowing on and off.’

‘Nice dream.’

‘There are three times when I don’t feel blind: when I show people around Clear Island; when I beat Father Wally at chess; and when I dream colours... Mo?’

‘Yes, John?’

‘Mo, what’s up?’

Huw told me that you always wake up a few seconds before the earthquake starts.

‘It’s today.’

I interact with John, the Texan, Heinz Formaggio and the rest of reality in the way that I do because I am who I am. Why am I who I am? Because of the double helix of atoms coiled along my DNA. What is DNA’s engine of change? Subatomic particles colliding with its molecules. These particles are raining onto the Earth now, resulting in mutations that have evolved the oldest single-celled life-forms through jellyfish to gorillas and us, Chairman Mao, Jesus, Nelson Mandela, His Serendipity, Hitler, you and I.

Evolution and history are the bagatelle of particle waves.

Liam came in and swigged a bottle of milk straight from the fridge. ‘Maybe they’re going to leave you be, Ma.’

‘Maybe, Liam.’

‘Really. If they were going to come and get you, surely they’d be here by now.’

‘Maybe.’

‘If that happens, could you get a job at the department at Cork? Could she, Da?’

‘The vice-chancellor would get down on his very knees, Liam,’ said John, his voice upholstered with tact, ‘but—’

‘There you go, Ma.’

Ah, Liam, the most malicious god is the god of the counted chicken.

The Trans-Siberian shunted through a slumberous forested evening in northern China. I was still toying with matrix mechanics, but getting nowhere. I’d been stuck with the same problem since Shanghai, and now I was wandering in circles.

‘Mind if I join you?’

The dining car had emptied. Did I know this young woman?

‘Sherry’s the name,’ said the Australian girl, waiting for me to say something.

‘Please, take a seat, let me move this junk for you...’

‘Maths, eh?’

Unusual for a young person to want to talk with an oldie like me. Still, we’re a long way from home, and don’t generalise, Mo. ‘Yes, I’m a maths teacher,’ I said. ‘That’s a thick book.’

‘War and Peace.’

‘Lot of it about. Particularly the former.’

A half-naked Chinese toddler ran up the corridor, making a zun-zun noise which may have been a helicopter, or maybe a horse.

‘I’m very sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’

I felt a stab of suspicion. Oh, Mo! She’s just a kid. ‘Mo. Mo Smith.’ Mo!

We shook hands. ‘Sherry Connolly. Are you going straight to Moscow, Mo, or stopping off ?’

‘Aye, straight through to Moscow, Petersburg, Helsinki, London, Ireland. How about you?’

‘I’m stopping off in Mongolia for a while.’

‘How long for?’

‘Until I want to move on.’

‘Good to be out of Beijing?’

‘You bet. It’s good to be out of my compartment! There are two Swedish guys, they’re drunk and having a belching competition. It’s like back home. Men can be such drongoes.’

‘I could get your compartment changed. Our babushka’s tame. I bribed her with a bottle of Chinese whisky.’

‘No worries, thanks. I grew up with five brothers, so I can handle two Swedes. We get to UB in thirty-six hours. Plus, there’s a hunky Danish guy in the bunk below me... You travelling alone too, Mo?’

‘Yes, all alone.’

Sherry gave me that look.

‘Great heavens, no! I’ve got a husband and a teenage son waiting at home.’

‘You must be missing them. They must be missing you.’

What a perfect pair of sentences. ‘Yep.’

‘Hey, I’ve got a flask of Chinese powdered lemon tea. Join me? It’s the real McCoy.’

It was nice to speak to a woman in my own language again. ‘I would love to.’

We talked until we got to the Mongolian border, where the train’s wheels were changed to fit the old Soviet gauge, and I realised how lonely I had become.

Maybe it was just the caffeine in Sherry’s tea, but when I next glanced at the black book I saw how utterly obvious the answer was: Trebevij’s constant broke the logjam. Mo, you’re a deadhead. I worked for what seemed a little while longer, and before I knew it the dining-car staff were starting the breakfast shift.

The islands, cities, forests, all left behind. Dawn welled up over the open grasslands of central Asia. I was an extremely tired, middle-aged, morally troubled quantum physicist with a very uncertain future, but I had gone somewhere no one else had ever been. I wobbled back to my compartment and slept for over a day.

Accepted wisdom accuses Dr Frankenstein of hubris.

I don’t think he was playing God. I think he was just being a scientist.

Can nuclear technology or genetically engineered parsnips or quantum cognition be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’? The only words for technology is ‘here’, or ‘not here’. The question is, once here, what are we going to do with it?

Dr Frankenstein did a runner, and that was his crime. He left his technology at the mercy of people who did what ignorant humans habitually do: throw stones and scream. If the good Doctor had shown his brainchild how to survive, adapt, and protect itself, all that gothic gore could have been saved, and transplant technology jumpstarted two centuries early.

I see what you’re saying, Mo, but how can you teach an engine to recognise right and wrong? To arm itself against abuse?

Look at the black book. If Quancog isn’t sentience, give me another name for it.

The telephone rang as I cracked my egg. It was next to John, so he answered. ‘Billy?’

John said nothing for a long time.

Bad news.

‘Right-o.’ He put the receiver down.

I knew it.

‘That was Billy, phoning from The Drum and Monkey in Baltimore. There are three Americans who look like The Blues Brothers coming over. The St Fachtna has developed some mysterious engine trouble, so won’t be coming back this morning, but he’s got to come back this evening. Danny Waite’s low on insulin, and there’s more rough weather for the rest of the week.’

A sharp spade cut through the earth, roots, peat and pebbles.

‘Ma,’ Liam was gripping my forearm. ‘We’ve got to get you away!’

Planck started barking. There was a bang on the door. Was it beginning now?

Liam led me through into the back. ‘Who’s there?’

‘Brendan Mickledeen!’

The door opened. What a feverish farce the morning was turning into. Brendan was out of breath. Air from outside, sweet and sharp. ‘Mo, Billy told me the Yanks have come. We can get you on Roisin’s boat to Schull. From there my sister-in-law can drive you to Ballydehob. After that—’

I held up my hand. ‘How — how does everyone know about this?’

It was a shock to hear Brendan raise his voice. ‘Clear Island looks after its own! McDermott’s boat is waiting! There’s not time to squabble about who told who what.’

I imagined it, peering into that possible reality. I would start running now, a journey of peering through taxi windows, raised newspapers, lowered umbrellas, up to Belfast maybe. And then what? Overseas again, if I can get that far, to some cheap country, all the while carrying the only extant blueprint for New Earth’s computer.

What path through the park brought you here, Mo?

It had become very quiet.

John cleared his throat. ‘It’s time to decide, love. What are you going to do?’

‘Brendan, thank you. But I cannot outrun the Pentagon using the Republic of Ireland’s public transport. I came back to face the music. That’s what I’m going to do.’

Brendan took out his asthma ventilator, shook it and inhaled. ‘Gabriel, me and the boys are ready to show the Yanks what we’re made of.’

I could pop with all the fear, irritation and love. ‘There’s going to be no fighting and no running.’

Liam frowned. ‘Then what are you going to do, Ma?’

I hoped I sounded braver than I felt. ‘Pack.’

Quantum Physics speaks in chance, with the syntax of uncertainty. You can know the position of an electron but you cannot know where it’s going, or where it is by the time you register the reading. John went blind. Or you can know its direction, but you cannot know its position. Heinz Formaggio at Light Box read my Belfast papers and offered me a job. The particles in the atoms of the brain of that young man who pulled me out of the path of the taxi in London were configured so that he was there, and able to, and willing to. Even the most complete knowledge of a radioactive atom will not tell you when it will decay. I don’t know when the Texan will be here. Nowhere does the microscopic world stop and the macroscopic world begin.

Liam had to stoop under the roof beams of John’s bedroom. Our bedroom. I remembered the first day he managed to get up the stairs on his own, arse-first, step by step, his face like Edmund Hillary’s.

‘Liam?’

‘Your wart’s gone, Ma.’

‘Well, so it has. Isn’t that something?’

‘Ma! You can’t just go without a fight.’

‘That is why I have to go. To stop fighting.’

‘But you said that Quancog will accelerate warfare by fifty years.’

‘That was half a year ago, at Light Box. I think I underestimated.’

‘I don’t get it.’

The black book lay on the dresser. ‘What if Quancog were powerful — ethical — enough to ensure that technology could no longer be abused? What if Quancog could act as a kind of... zookeeper?’

‘I don’t understand. Where would that take it?’

The men were arguing in the kitchen below.

‘In five hundred years we are going to be either extinct, or... something better. Technology has outstripped our capacity to look after it. But, suppose I — suppose Quancog could ensure that technology looked after itself, and—’ Christ, what was this sounding like? ‘Liam, is your ma a complete madwoman?’

Between here and the strand a flock of sheep were all bleating at once. Liam’s face hung still as a portrait’s. The beginning of a smile went as soon as it came. ‘What’s to stop them taking the black book and elbowing you out of the picture?’ Liam is a bright kid.

‘Ah yes. The black book.’

Red Kildare’s Norton thundered down the drive and skidded to a halt in the yard. Heisenberg squawked and flew up to his perch on the telegraph pole.

‘It’s Red,’ said John. ‘He’ll have come to milk Feynman.’

Red Kildare walked into the kitchen. ‘They found you then, Mo! Any chance of a cuppa?’

‘Does every last soul on Clear know about my contretemps with the Americans?’

‘Island secrets are hidden from mainlanders, but never from the islanders,’ quoted Red, offering us all a sherbet bomb. ‘Shouldn’t worry. All Yanks think they can buy anything. They probably just want to raise their offer.’

John sighed. ‘I may be blind as a stone, Red, but if you think that these people want only to chat about job perks then compared to you, I am the Hubble Telescope.’

Red shrugged, and popped in a sherbet bomb. ‘In that case, it’s hailing pigshit on Mo. And when it’s hailing pigshit, there’s but one thing to do.’

‘What?’ asked Liam.

‘Go to The Green Man and have a drink’

‘That’s the best idea I’ve heard all morning,’ I said.

‘I can hear Father Wally’s tricycle,’ said John.

Father Wally came in and sat down, panting. ‘Mo,’ he said, trying to understand a world too muddled for his vision. ‘This is tantamount to kidnap! You’ve committed no crime! How did all of this come about?’

Take any two electrons — or, in Dr Bell and my case, photons — that originate from a common source, measure and combine their spins, and you will get zero. However far away they are: between John and me, between Okinawa and Clear Island, or between the Milky Way and Andromeda: if one of the particles is spinning down, then you know that that other is spinning up. You know it now! You don’t have to wait for a light-speed signal to tell you. Phenomena are interconnected regardless of distance, in a holistic ocean more voodoo than Newton. The future is reset by the tilt of a pair of polarised sunglasses. ‘The simultaneity of the ocean, Father Wally.’

‘I don’t believe I’m altogether following you, Mo.’

‘Father, Red, Brendan... could I have a couple of moments with John and Liam alone?’

‘Aye, Mo, of course. We’ll wait for you at the end of the drive.’

‘I’m going to be so lonely without you two.’

Liam was determined to be brave. John was being John. My two men hugged me.

‘I’m going to feed Feynman,’ I said eventually.

‘Feynman can feed herself.’

‘I can’t finish my breakfast. I’ve got a few juicy scraps she’d appreciate.’

The chrome on Red Kildare’s Norton gleamed. Its engine purred at walking pace. Father Wally’s tricycle squeaked. Leaves ran down the track, a cloud of minnows. ‘This puts me in mind of the Palm Sunday parade,’ said Father Wally.

Was it really only three days since I walked up from the harbour alone? Had so much time passed? Had so little? ‘What day is it today?’

‘Thursday?’ said Liam.

‘Monday,’ said Red.

‘Wednesday,’ said Brendan.

The stream clattered across the road.

‘I hear music.’

Brendan grinned. ‘You must be imagining things again, Mo Muntervary.’

‘No! I can hear “The Rocky Road to Dublin”!’

Planck picked up his feet as we descended the crook of the hill, sensing an occasion to show off. As we rounded the crook of the hill at Ancient O’Farrell’s, I saw a crowd of islanders spilling out of The Green Man into the garden. I squeezed John’s hand. ‘Did you know about this?’ There was a banner draped over the door: ‘Clear Island’s Finest’.

‘I’m only a blind harper,’ answered my husband.

‘Just a limited affair,’ said Liam, ‘confined to friends and family.’

‘I thought I was going to be smuggled out in secret.’

‘Not without a quick bevvy first, you weren’t.’

‘We knew you were decided, Mo,’ said Father Wally.

‘But we wanted to give you the chance to change your mind,’ finished Red.

‘Yoohoo! Liam!’ said Bernadette Sheehy, sitting on the wall, crossing her legs.

‘Hello, Bernadette!’ sang John and I.

In the bar of The Green Man it was standing room only. Eamonn’s boy was playing his accordion. Even the birdwatchers in their anoraks were there, bemused but happy. I looked for the New Zealander, but she wasn’t there.

A birdwatcher in a leather jacket was leaning on the bar. He turned around as I entered. ‘Good afternoon, Dr Muntervary. I thought Ireland was all bombs, rain and homosexual giants of literature.’ He took off his wide brown sunglasses. ‘This is quite a shindig. It’s a shame we can’t stay longer.’

The floor of The Green Man swelled. And then, so strangely, I’m relieved it’s all over. At least I can stop running.

‘Ma,’ Liam knew before anyone else. ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’

The jig carried on, spiralling around with a life of its own.

What happens to all the seconds tipped into the bin of the past?

And what happens to the other universes where electrons follow other paths, where thoughts and mutations and actions differ? Where I was captured in Huw’s apartment? Where my father is still alive and my mother bright as the button she always was, where John never went blind, where my precocity and ambition were those of a small farmer’s wife, where nuclear weapons were invented by 1914, where Homo Erectus went the same fossilised way as Australopithecines, where DNA never zipped itself up, where stars were never born to die in a shroud of carbon and heavier elements, where the big bang crunched back under the weight of its own mass a few jiffies after it banged?

Or are all these universes hung out, side by side, to drip dry?

‘Yes, Liam,’ said the Texan, after the jig had stopped. ‘It’s him.’

‘Mo,’ said Mayo Davitt in Gaelic, ‘do you want us to shove him into the harbour?’

‘Talk,’ commanded the Texan, ‘in English.’

‘Fuck,’ responded Mayo Davitt in Gaelic, ‘a donkey.’

The Texan sized Mayo Davitt up, like a soldier would.

‘There isn’t to be any fighting,’ I said, wishing my voice hadn’t sounded so frail.

Red Kildare stood in front of me. ‘Clear Islanders take exception when outsiders come along and take our scientists.’

‘And the Government of the United States takes exception when a foreign scientist makes free use of the world’s most sophisticated supercolliders and AI research paid for by NATO — hell, by America — and then uses these experiments to formulate theories which could change what technology is, and then bolts, for all we know into the arms of the highest bidder.’

‘I bolted first,’ I corrected, ‘and then formulated the theory.’

‘How can Mo steal a theory when it’s the fruit of her own God-given intelligence?’ asked Father Wally.

‘I’d love to discuss the theosophy of our situation all day, Father. Truly I would. But we have a helicopter on standby, so let me cut to the legal position. Under Requisition Clause 13b of the NATO Official Secrets Act, the Light Box Research owns whatever comes out of Dr Muntervary’s head. We own Light Box Research. A preacher of your intelligence can reach your own conclusion.’

‘Get on your helicopter and sod off then.’ Maisie advanced. ‘You’re not welcome in The Green Man, and you’re not welcome on Clear Island.’

‘Dr Muntervary? Your godmother thinks it’s time for us to leave.’

Freddy Doig got up, and Bertie Crow too. ‘Mo’s going nowhere!’

The Texan shook his head in fake disbelief, jerked his thumb at the window, and we all looked. Brendan whistled softly. ‘Holy Dooley, Mo, you have been doing well for yourself.’

A line of marines in combat gear stared back. Some islanders stood in awed huddles, some were hurrying away.

‘Dear Lord,’ said Freddy Doig. ‘What film did they get those guns from?’

‘Somebody tell me what’s happening,’ commanded John.

‘Soldiers,’ said Liam. ‘Ten of them. To apprehend my supercriminal ma.’

‘If I could see you,’ said John to the Texan, ‘I would use every muscle in my body to try to stop you. I want you to know that.’

‘Mr Cullin,’ said the Texan. ‘These are the cards your wife has drawn. I guarantee that her treatment as a guest of the Pentagon will be in accordance with her stature. But her wildcat days have to end. She must come with us. I have my orders.’

‘Take your pigging orders,’ said Bertie Crow, ‘and ram ’em right up your Yank—’

A helicopter drowned him out, chopping the water and jostling the fishing boats.

The Texan glanced back at the marines and reached into his jacket for his cigarettes. We all saw his holster. He lit up, taking all the time in the world. ‘How do you want to play this, Doctor? The outcome will be the same. You know that.’

All eyes were on me. ‘Everyone. Thank you. But I’ve got to go with them.’

The Texan allowed himself a smile.

‘After we have negotiated terms. Term one: in matters pertaining to Quancog, I am accountable to nobody.’

The Texan feigned surprise. ‘What is this about “Terms”, Dr Muntervary? “Terms” might have been on the table six months ago. But you forfeited your right to “terms” when you became a fugitive. You are ours, Doctor, and so is your black book.’

‘A black book, is it? Would a black book be worth something to you now?’

Impatience narrowed his eyes. ‘Lady, you don’t seem to realise. Your work is American Defense Department property. You had the black book when you visited your mother in Skibbereen. You have it now — somewhere — and if you’ve hidden it, we’ll find it. Get your working relationship with the Pentagon off to a good start, and give it to me. Now.’

‘You’d better ask Feynman, then.’

The Texan’s voice grew tauter. ‘There’s nobody of that name. We’ve been following you since Petersburg, lady. Allowing you to continue your work in peace, and making everything good and smooth for you. There has been no “Feynman”.’

‘It’s not my problem if you don’t believe me. Feynman has the black book.’

Father Wally laughed. ‘Feynman the goat?’

The Texan did not laugh. ‘You just said “goat”?’

‘I’ll gladly say it again for you,’ said Father Wally. ‘“Goat.”’

The Texan glared at me. ‘You mind telling me what a goat wants with quantum cognition?’

I swallowed. ‘Goats aren’t fussy when they’re hungry.’

‘Mo,’ said John in Gaelic. ‘Are you bluffing?’

‘No, John. I’m too scared to bluff.’

The Texan’s fists and jaw clenched. He put on his sunglasses. ‘Nobody leaves this room.’ The islanders fell back as he marched out to the marines. He yelled a few words at the saluting one. Through the open window we heard the words ‘purple fuckin’ blazes’. He pulled out a cell phone from a holster, scowling as his spoke.

John murmured in my ear. ‘This is dangerous.’

‘I know.’

‘But if you pull it off, I have a term of my own I want to suggest...’

The Texan stomped back into The Green Man.

‘What terms do you have in mind, Dr Muntervary?’

The ground became land, the land an island, and Clear Island just another island amongst the larger ones and smaller ones. Aodhagan a little box. The Texan was in the helicopter cockpit. Two armed marines were behind me, two more in front. Surrounded by men, as usual.

‘Cheer up, Mo,’ said John, tightening his grip on my arm. ‘Stick to your guns and Liam will be over for Christmas.’

Finally, I understand how the electrons, protons, neutrons, photons, neutrinos, positrons, muons, pions, gluons and quarks that make up the universe, and the forces that hold them together, are one.