Chapter 5: Falafel and Suicide
Zoë, Wednesday 10th March, morning
On Wednesday morning I feel more compos mentis and determined to get some genuine answers out of someone. I also feel slightly silly, like a little kid playing at detectives, but I try to ignore this.
There are two leads I want to follow up on, Richard's family and the head of physics. There I go: “leads” for fuck's sake!
I start with the family, and surprise myself with the ease of finding out that Richard has a sister called Suzie living in London, and locating her home and mobile phone numbers. A total of twenty-seven minutes on the internet. I bet it would take less than that to find out about me – I really must pay more attention to all those warnings about what you shouldn't post on social networking sites.
So is Suzie Mortimer anything to do with my non-existent sister? It takes a while to psych myself up to phone her. No reply at home, and the mobile goes straight to voicemail: “This is Suzie Mortimer's phone. As you may have guessed, I can't answer right now, so please leave a message.” The voice is soft and girly but with a kind of cold sarcasm in it. I spend the next hour pacing around the flat like a caged animal until I can't stand the suspense and call again.
“Hello?” It's the same voice.
“Hello, is that Suzie Mortimer? I'm... er... my name's Zoë Meredith...” Suzie hangs up.
I stare at the silent phone for a few moments as if it might do something amazing. I made a bit of a pig's ear of that, sounding all timid and bumbling. I should have thought this out in advance. Annoyed with myself, I take a deep breath and press redial.
This time Suzie has more to say. “Don't you think I've got enough on my plate as it is, what with my darling fucking genius brother blowing his brains out over some fucking lunatic fantasy? But no, on top of it all I get his teenage fucking floozy phoning up demanding an explanation. That's rich, that is. That's really fucking rich. For all I know it was probably you that fucking convinced him he was fucking immortal in the fucking first place. What are you, some kind of sect? Some kind of fucking loony perverted fucking...” this time I hang up. I'm obviously not going to get any help from Suzie Mortimer.
I suppose it's hardly surprising that she's heard of me – my name was in the paper for a start, if only the local one – Don's Shotgun Death Drama, to be precise – which she is reasonably unlikely to have read if she lives in London (and if she's calling me a teenager – in true crap-paper style I was introduced as Zoë Meredith, 20). More likely she's picked up on some of the gossip which I'm aware has been going around.
Then I remember the phrases over some fucking lunatic fantasy and convinced him he was fucking immortal. What's that all about? This just gets weirder and weirder. And I'm no closer to answering whether my “sister” has anything to do with his sister.
The head of the physics department is next. Professor Henry Weinmann. According to DC Green he was the source of the most bizarre details so far, the stuff about salt substitute and the French Revolution.
I get ready and set off to the physics department, which I find full of people milling about on their way to and from lectures and tutorials and so on. I see this place in a different phase of activity every time I come in here, like one of those photography projects where they take a picture of the same tree in different seasons. It's quite nice being in the middle of a crowd of people who don't know me, and I stand there for a while just soaking up the anonymity.
After a while the rush dies down as the various classes get underway and I look around, taking in the details of the place in a way I haven't done before.
Next to the entrance there's the little booth where the man with the huge mug of tea was sitting – his mug's still there (it's a Manchester City one, I notice) but he seems to have knocked off for a... a non-tea break or something. A break from drinking tea. Probably gone for a fag, come to think of it.
Next to that there's the wall with the wooden panels where I found Silas and Professor Weinmann's names. The panels, in a richly honey-coloured wood, extend all round the entrance area, giving it a much posher look than the rest of the building.
Opposite the entrance, there's a wide curving flight of fake-marble steps with a strip of maroon carpet up the middle, leading up to a kind of mezzanine floor, and from the two back corners corridors lead off to more functional parts of the building – one of them is that corridor. Doors in the two side walls lead into lecture theatres, one of which is the Heisenberg Lecture Theatre where Richard's course took place.
I've never really looked around the department – apart from running around like a mad thing on Friday morning – and I'm quite curious to have a wander. If anyone asks me what I'm doing I have a perfect excuse – I'm looking for Professor Weinmann and I got lost.
I go up the wide steps and find a coffee machine and some chairs and tables – some kind of deserted mini common room – and behind a glass partition a small library with a bored-looking librarian and a few students poring over books and occasionally swearing under their breath. They ignore me as I go past. I vaguely remember seeing this bit on Friday, but it looked different and rather spooky, in semi-darkness with the door into the library locked.
At the opposite end is another door leading to what seems to be the main staircase, which must have been where I went as I ran around crying and alone on Friday morning. With a little trepidation I go on up. As far as I can see my excuse for being here still holds.
On the next floor, a timetable and a piece of paper printed with the words First-Year Lab are Blu-Tacked on the door leading out of the stairwell. I try the door and it opens. Inside I find myself in a weird world like a cross between a modern art gallery and a sci-fi film. A series of long tables or benches is covered in strange apparatus mounted on the ubiquitous clamp stands.
I feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland as I wander among the peculiar contraptions. This is so different from my world of essays, tutorials and the library. There really are students who spend their Thursdays (according to the timetable on the door) messing around with pieces of equipment which might, as far as I'm concerned, be from a film set for Star Trek.
On one bench a system of long, straight wires strung between clamp stands is connected to various pieces of electronics – I recognise an oscilloscope and even remember the word, but the rest of it's a mystery to me. On another, a lead weight dangles on a fishing line next to a measuring device whose purpose I can't even begin to guess, and on a third the clamp stands hold a series of U-shaped glass tubes and some more electrical stuff.
With a little shock like understanding something spoken in a language you never realised you could make head or tail of, I realise I recognise one of the pieces of apparatus – it's what Richard demonstrated to us in the first lecture. The long grey box is a laser – I wouldn't have recognised it but the warning label saying “class 2 laser” rather gives the game away – and the thing it's pointing at is a photographic slide – from close up I can see it consists of two incredibly fine clear lines on a black background.
A bit more of the lecture comes back to me now – Richard's animation of his blue ball bearings blurring out into banana-shaped waves and passing through two gaps in a wall; on the other side they turned into something like a choppy sea as the waves did what Richard called “interfering with each other“. We all found this very amusing – infantile I know but it was too early in the morning for sophistication.
The point was that waves cancel each other in the places where they're out of time with each other – that's what he meant by “interfering“. And that you get the same kind of pattern even if instead of light you use things like electrons that they never used to think of as waves. And – it's all coming back now – you even get it when you turn down the source so much that there's only one particle in the equipment at a time, which means that each particle must go through both gaps simultaneously in its weird blurry way.
Looking around to make sure no-one is watching, I can't resist trying it out. I find a switch, shield my eyes – you never know with unfamiliar objects with warning labels on them – and cautiously turn the laser on, half expecting the whole set-up to explode. Instead, the same pattern of stripes Richard showed us lights up on the little screen. Feeling disproportionately pleased with myself, I switch it off again and wander on. Glad I sorted that out.
“Can I help you?” says a voice behind me, and I nearly jump out of my skin. I wheel round to see who's talking and get another shock – he looks like Stig of the Dump.
“Er, hiya. Are you one of the lecturers here?” I ask nervously. He doesn't look like a lecturer to me, but I'm never too sure with these physicists.
“I'm the technician. Mick Middlethorpe.”
He holds out his hand rather nervously and I shake it. “Hi. I'm Zoë Meredith. I'm...”
“Aren't you Richard's... er... friend?”
I nod. I'm not sure what to think of his obvious difficulty in finding an appropriate word. Some people might be offended I suppose, but “er... friend” seems a reasonable description – better than Suzie's term “teenage fucking floozy” anyway.
And another sign that we were being gossiped about – I vaguely wonder if that was about to blow up into some kind of big-time scandal. That can't be why... no, surely not.
“Were you friends with Richard?”
“We used to play pool together in the pub.” Mick looks sad and shy at the same time. “I'm going to miss him, he was a good bloke.”
“I don't suppose you have any idea why...” I feel tears beginning to prick at my eyes and fight them back. How long is it going to take before I can talk about this without all these bloody waterworks?
“I hoped you might be able to tell me.” I notice his eyes look unusually shiny too, and suddenly he doesn't seem like a weird caveman any more but quite a nice bloke. I shake my head.
“I've been trying to find out and it's all a bit too weird. Actually I was looking for Professor Weinmann, I thought he might be able to, you know... shed a bit of light on it.” I picture Weinmann exploring dark tunnels with some kind of weird laser equipment lighting the way.
“I haven't seen him today, but his room's on the ground floor, the corridor on your right just before the way out.”
“Thanks.”
“If you do find out anything, I'd be grateful if you could... you know...”
“Let you know? I will. I promise.”
The right-hand corridor is the one opposite Richard's and I find Weinmann's door but there's nobody there. I wait for a while, and after about ten minutes a flood of people starts pouring out of the building like a receding tide. Lunchtime.
I'm hungry, and nothing ever happens on Wednesday afternoons – all the departments keep them free for undergraduates, supposedly so that we can “take part in sporting activities”, though I don't know anyone who does. Weinmann might still be back in the afternoon, I suppose, but I'm not going to hang around here on the off chance – I can use the time better looking for references to salt substitute and the French Revolution in the notes from Richard's course.
I consider stopping for a proper meal in the Students' Union bar, but decide I can't face the questions I'm bound to get bombarded with, so I head for the flat and my stash of falafel mix.
