The Square Root of Summer(55)

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

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

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

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

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

Click.

Whir.

Ow.

“Harrumph. Harrumph. Gottie.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And,” continues Papa, beaming, “we’re running out of bedrooms to put babies in!”

I make a harrumph noise of my own. “Papa, was that a joke? Because we’re still wrapping our heads round the duck one.”

“One of its legs is the same,” Papa chuckles, wiping his eyes at his favorite punch line. I roll mine (it hurts). Seventeen years of “What’s the difference between a duck?” and I still don’t get it, but it always has Papa—and Grey—rolling on the floor in stitches.

I make a little shooing motion with my pen, hoping he’ll go away so I can commune with my headache, but he just carries on giggling. I haven’t seen Papa laugh in months. It’s nice.

“We didn’t know with Ned, I mean. We knew the second time, obviously—when you were to arrive,” Papa carries on, oblivious to my grimacing. Maybe this is his plan: gross me out with conception talk so I’ll spend my time with Thomas crossing my legs. “But still.”

“Papa, I know,” I say, to hurry him along. I’ve already gone off the thought of the banana cake in my bag.

“Maybe you don’t,” he says contrarily. “I saw in your room, you’d put the picture of you and your mami. This is where the hair is from?”

I prod my hair self-consciously and one-shoulder-shrug, neither ja nor nein.

Papa looks down at Umlaut in his lap as he sucks air in round his teeth. “You know, you always were such a surprise.”

“A surprise?”

“Mmmm. I was deferred, you know? And Mami too, with her Saint Martins place. We were thinking to go back to London with Ned, then”—he makes a funny little whoosh noise, an explosion with his hands, sending Umlaut’s fur on end—“things changed. There was going to be a Gottie. So even though we knew,” he harrumphs, “knowing isn’t always enough. Which is why, maybe better that Thomas sleeps in his own room.”