Free Gravity's Chain by Alan Goodwin Page B

a ghost of the weirdness all week.
    The girls settled down for some serious tanning and the boys for some casual appraising. Jo knew she looked good. There was something in the way she tensed her legs and lay with one angled up, the knee jutting toward the sky. She was the only one of the three without sunglasses and whenever I walked past she’d look at me, one eye closed against the glare of the sun. Did she still like me? I was afraid to find out for fear of rejection. Helen was squatter and chunkier and already her thighs were heavy, like those of a middle-aged woman with dimples of cellulite. Then there was Mary. I’d never noticed her grace before, never seen the length of her limbs and her subtle movements. There on the beach, Mary Roberts strolled out of the shadows like a panther emerging from a dark forest.
    We had talked about the first evening for weeks and in the days before we had all endlessly run through in our minds just what it would be like. We ate fish and chips, we drank beer and then wine, and we smoked dope. Once the sunset came, Mary lit candles that she’d brought with her in an old cardboard box and placed all around the front room. She had saved them for years. The evening settled down after the initial burst of excitement. The jokes faded and the drink and drugs bit.
    â€˜How do you feel about Cambridge, Jack?’ Helen sat on thefloor, like a sleeping cat at my feet. She sipped from a beer can without looking up.
    â€˜Fine.’
    â€˜Oh come on,’ Mike snorted as he came from the downstairs bedroom where he and I were sleeping carrying his guitar, ‘you’re going to one of the greatest universities in the world where they think you’re a bloody paid-up member of the genius club and all you can say is fine?’
    â€˜What do you want me to say?’
    â€˜Do you think you’ll miss home?’ Mary sat furthest from me, her face hidden in shadows, her voice soft and comforting.
    â€˜I guess so, yes.’
    Mike plucked a spliff from Jo’s hand, took a deep puff and passed it to me before picking up his guitar and sliding it on his lap. ‘Two weeks there and you won’t even remember New Zealand, and you won’t fucking remember us either. You’ll have a bloody amazing time.’
    â€˜Maybe, but I’ll miss you lot.’
    There was a moment’s silence before a chorus of catcalls and raspberries filled the room. Mike strummed the first four chords of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and then suddenly stopped as a wide grin crossed his face. ‘Tell me, Jack,’ he said as he twanged three notes, one for every word, ‘what is 321,640 divided by 618?’ He barked the numbers like a sergeant major on the training ground. Everyone turned to me. This was a favourite party piece.
    â€˜Easy, 520.453.’
    â€˜My God, how do you do that,’ squealed Jo, who hadn’t seen this before. ‘Can you do it again?’
    There was silence. ‘You have to give me some numbers,’ I said to her, half laughing.
    â€˜Oh yeah, right…62,220 times 115.’
    â€˜7,155,300.’ Mike strummed his guitar in time with my rhythmic answer.
    â€˜Square root of 426,000?’
    â€˜652.687.’
    They all cheered and laughed. Mike broke the silence with ‘She Loves You’, which we all sang at the top of our voices, shaking our heads wildly at the ‘ooohhh’.
    We sang for an hour. At the end Mary gave me the sunniest smile of the evening: her face opened up and the joy poured out like a torrent and I knew it was just for me. It churned my guts, that bloody smile, like the sweetest dose of food poisoning any man could have. When she turned away, the smile vanished and her face closed down, but I’d glimpsed her inner happiness for one brief searing moment and it was beautiful. She was beautiful. I’d never seen that in a human before, so I knew I was privileged, and I yearned for it