He Said/She Said(7)

‘That’s what he wants the world to see. Don’t you think it’s more important how you treat the person next to you?’ I asked.

In Kit’s answering smile, I saw a quiet integrity, so different to the boys who’d come before him, their politics printed on their T-shirts, and just as changeable.

‘Well, I . . .’ Whatever he was going to say next was interrupted by a low growl from the room next door that could have come from either one of them.

‘Anyway,’ I said, desperate to cover the noise, ‘You were going to tell me what this tune had to do with maths.’

Kit took the cue to turn up the music. A sitar riff danced around a thumping bass. His brow was furrowed in concentration. ‘Leibniz said, Music is the mind counting without being conscious it’s counting. An eclipse is maths; it’s the most beautiful maths there is.’ Lost for words in the face of such intensity, I made what I hoped was an encouraging face. ‘The moon, right, it’s one-four-hundredth the diameter of the sun, but it’s four hundred times closer to earth, so it looks like they’re the same size.’

I got the feeling I was going to need some kind of animated diagram if this was to make sense, but it seemed important not to look ignorant in front of him. ‘How many eclipses have you seen?’ I said, to bring the conversation, if not down to earth, closer to my orbit, and he was off. He told me about driving around the Americas with his dad, about the time in India where they watched the sun vanish with his dad, his brother ‘and a load of really confused goats’ edging their way along the wall of a ruined temple. He told me about Aruba, where they’d stood on sand so hot it melted plastic and seen Venus and Jupiter, ‘clear and round as pins in a corkboard’. How the planets and stars always came out and stopped hiding, like they didn’t want to miss it. ‘When you see it, when you stand underneath it, it isn’t science. All that falls away.’ The colour rose in his cheeks as he got technical again, talking me through the stages of an eclipse, describing the flaming ring of fire called the corona appearing around the sun, how the 1919 eclipse provided evidence for Einstein’s theory of relativity by showing that the sun’s mass bent light from distant stars. Partly I was listening to what he said and interested, but also partly I was watching him talk; the way his face changed completely when he was animated, the way his eyes skittered about in shyness as well as recall. I tried to imagine Mac talking for this long about any subject other than himself, and the thought made me smile. ‘Ah, I’m boring you,’ he said.

‘You’re really not.’

‘Mac says I go on too much. What about you? You’re on Ling’s course, aren’t you? What are you going to do after graduation?’

I told him about my grand plan, to work in the City for a few years until I had the CV to defect to the charity sector. I’d seen too many of my dad’s bumbling, earnest friends shaking collection tins, spending all day chasing a handful of coppers.

‘There’s only one way of making a difference to people’s lives, and that’s with money. And if you want money, you’ve got to go where there’s loads of it.’

‘Like Robin Hood, but with spreadsheets and hedge-fund managers?’

‘That’s a very good way of putting it.’

As the candles burned to stubs, we exchanged potted biographies, the way you do when you’re young and all you’ve got to offer beyond record collections and your degree course are the people you grew up with. There was a sense, that night with Kit, that this information was important; here’s what you’re getting into, we were saying. Still want to go for it?

I learned that Kit’s parents, Adele and Lachlan, lived in Bedfordshire, in the third house in as many years, downsizing first when Lachlan had lost his job, and again when he’d drunk away their remaining equity. Adele was teaching textiles at a sixth-form college while she waited for her husband to die. Lachlan McCall, Kit said, had been what they call a functioning alcoholic, then a jobless one, until one day, a couple of years earlier, his liver had finally given out. They wouldn’t put him on the transplant list until he stopped drinking. And he was still on the bottle.

‘Mac’s never said anything,’ I said.

‘Well, he wouldn’t, would he? You’ve seen the way he is. I mean, I like a drink now and then, but he’s on another level. I don’t even think losing Dad will stop him.’

His lip quivered once. When I offered up the loss of my mum, Kit simply said, ‘Oh, Laura, I’m so sorry. That’s no age for grief.’

The floor between us suddenly contained two graves, one full and overgrown, one empty and waiting. I became aware of the background music and for a long time neither of us said anything. When the CD whirred to its end, Kit gulped a couple of times, as if he was working up to a big speech, before mumbling into his jumper, ‘I like your hair.’

(I like your hair, or some variation on those words, was the first thing most people said to me back then. It had been waist-length mousy-brown string when I arrived at university; desperate to reinvent myself, I’d bleached it in my halls-of-residence bathroom on my first night away from home, turning it into a skein of bright white silk. I’ve worn it that way ever since, doing the roots every three weeks. It makes me sound incredibly high-maintenance, but I don’t wear much make-up and I don’t follow fashion. When you only have one vanity, I think you’re allowed to indulge it.)