Free Addition by Toni Jordan Page A

time. ‘Let’s aim a bit lower. Is your car outside?’
    I shake my head. ‘I walked.’
    ‘What if I walk you home? If you’d like.’ He pauses for a moment and bites his lower lip with his front tooth. The left one.
    It leaves a dent.
    ‘I’d like.’
    He looks politely at the chewing gum and chocolate bars as I go through the checkout with 14 toothbrushes. He pays for his half chicken and vegetables. We go outside. It’s quiet except for a boy collecting shopping trolleys; coasting on them, squeaking, from under the streetlight where they’d been deserted. Seamus reaches across me to take my plastic bag of toothbrushes. A well-brought-up boy. Chivalrous. His fingers take the two white plastic straps from mine. His fingers are not mine. Are different from mine, so different I’m amazed that he also has ten. I notice the size of his hands. Their colour. The tiny pale hairs on the back of his fingers.
    We reach the corner before I realise I’ve forgotten to count the steps.
    The mathematician and engineer Charles Babbage, inventor of the first computer, got it. When he read Tennyson’s poem, ‘The vision of sin’, he was most upset.
    He was so upset he sent Tennyson a letter. It went:
    ‘Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born’; I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: ‘Every moment dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is born.’ I may add that the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.
    I know this letter by heart, and as I leave the supermarket next to Seamus I think each syllable with my footfall but I don’t count. All the way home I don’t count. The street is empty and it’s been raining. The water makes the tram tracks shine in the street lamps and we don’t speak. A car goes past. And another. We don’t speak. A third splashes some water on to my feet. He stops, takes my arm and manoeuvres me so I am no longer walking on the street side. He puts me on the inside.
    Charles Babbage definitely got it. Most people don’t. They don’t understand that numbers rule, not just the world in a macro way but their world, their own world. Their lives. They know that E=MC 2 because they heard it in school or it was the answer to a quiz show question. They don’t really understand what it means: that matter and energy are the same thing. That their skinny latte and iPod and nipple ring are all energy; little packets of energy constrained very close together. That everything and everybody are connected by a mathematical formula.
    Would Seamus get it if I told him?
    At the lights he pushes the walk button. This is the only time it’s awkward, right now, waiting for the lights to change.
    ‘Have you lived here long?’ He turns towards me as he speaks.
    ‘Forever. Prahran or Brunswick would be groovier, I know, but I like the spaces. I like the spaces between the people better than the people themselves.’ The green man appears. The beeps begin. I sound like an idiot.
    He frowns. ‘Space. Everyone needs space.’
    As we walk I realise our pace is almost identical although he is taller. He is slowing his gait to match mine. I take a deep breath. ‘Sometimes I feel my thoughts can’t properly develop if they run into another person as soon as they’re born. They need room to work out exactly what shape to take.’
    We’ve been walking for at least ten or eleven minutes and he’s said almost nothing. Walking these streets together, it feels like we’re in church. I fight the urge to whisper. There’s no wind. I hear nothing but cars in High Street, shushing through puddles, and