Epilogue

Epilogue

Zoë, Tuesday 30th March
Two weeks have passed since I finally got the Richard business resolved to my satisfaction, and there's been a bit of a change of plan. I've persuaded the university to do what they call granting me an Interruption of Studies, which basically means giving me a year off.
It came at the cost of going to a lot of the counselling sessions that Vanessa Robinson was trying to push. The therapist is called Gus, and looks more like a stereotype Freudian psychoanalyst than a counsellor – he has an almost Freud-like little beard and the kind of tweed jacket that academics wear in historical costume dramas on the telly. I half expected him to have a comedy-Austrian accent, and I keep thinking I can actually hear it. He asks me a lot of apparently irrelevant questions and then gives me no feedback at all on my answers, just keeps telling me to “go on” when I have nothing more to say. The first couple of sessions also involved the weird gimmick of other people listening from behind a two-way mirror and then coming into the room to have a conversation about me as if I wasn't there, which freaked me out so much that I insisted they stop it.
I'm sure it's all based on some completely outdated or just plain made-up theories of psychology and is basically a pile of crap. For the most part I find the sessions quite amusing, though, and I sit there trying not to laugh, which is quite therapeutic in itself – maybe not as therapeutic as if I was laughing out loud though. Maybe I should try not suppressing it and see what happens.
I told Tom about the counselling and he did a bit of what he calls “background research” – he didn't explain how he did it – and came up with some interesting facts about Vanessa, who was apparently on a drug rehabilitation programme back in the eighties, together with none other than Henry Weinmann. If I was the paranoid type and inclined to see connections where there aren't any I could build a whole conspiracy theory around that. But I'm not, and coincidences happen.
So anyway I've now got nearly a year before I need to start going to any classes. I've bought myself a book called Work Your Way Around the World – all about how to get jobs picking fruit in France or teaching English to kids in Korea – and I'm making plans to go off travelling. With Tom – yes I know, but it's not what it sounds like. I'm not about to leap headlong into another unwise relationship, we're going to head off together on the basis that we're friends and we'll see where we go from there. Maybe our separate ways, maybe... well, you never know.
Meanwhile it's spring and everything seems infinitely better than it did a few weeks ago in the grey butt-end of winter – you just go outside and the sun is shining, the birds are singing, there are flowers everywhere. Or as Charlie put it on another of his stoned walks in the country, everywhere is bright with the colourful genitalia of the plant kingdom and insects fly from organ to organ performing vegetable sex acts in the sun.
Jasmine is still mildly concerned about me but mostly giving me a break, and Charlie is still smoking what normal people consider to be far too much weed and making dangerous wines out of unexpected fruits, but managing to take his course seriously nevertheless. I'm going to miss them, but you need a reason to look forward to getting back.
Apart from spending a lot of time with Jasmine and Charlie, I've been trying to reconnect with the world beyond this little bubble I've been living in lately. Alex from the bar has started going out with the chief rugby boy – as far as I can tell she's gone completely mad. Glen's band are no longer Felonious Monkey – they're now Orangutangle but they still sound like they're just playing random notes without listening to each other. They're recording a demo CD called Ten Kilowatt Meow Noises. I've also been for a drink with Colin Todd and Mick the technician – I made myself go just to show I can talk to them about other stuff, but I actually quite enjoyed it.
Tom and I have been spending a lot of time talking over where we'd like to go. We'll have to start off somewhere that's cheap to get to and where there's bar work – Charlie immediately suggested Madrid or Barcelona – but we're hoping to make it to somewhere more exotic. Tom's come round today and brought a selection of flyers he's picked up in travel agencies and guide books that he's borrowed from friends. “Where do you fancy most then?” he says.
“Somewhere where they aren't obsessed with immortality.” As soon as I've said it I can see what an idiotic comment it is.
Tom sees it too and does a carefully-calculated dramatic pause before he suggests, “Mars?”
“Good point.”
I flick through some of the leaflets, full of pictures of the world's most famous sights. The Taj Mahal, built by some emperor or other so that the memory of his wife would live on. All those palaces, the high and mighty's monuments to themselves and their loved ones, to keep their names alive after death. The astonishing temple of Wat Rong Khun in Thailand with its bridge representing the transition from the cycle of reincarnation into eternity, the temple of Chion-In in Japan, whose founder (the booklet says) “proclaimed that sentient beings are reborn in Buddha's Paradise”. And no end of cathedrals, dripping with gold, where the faithful pray for their immortal souls.
They're all at it, the bastards. And if what Richard wrote in one of the darker-toned scraps of writing I found among his files – the real reason to pity Schrödinger's kitty – is true, we should all be hoping there is no such thing as immortality.
I look again at the pictures of cathedrals. There really is an awful lot of gold. What could that have bought in this life if people hadn't been persuaded to bet everything on an eternity that might never happen? What if death is, as Colin put it the first time we met him and Richard in the pub, “just existing and then not existing, the time-reversal of the not-existing-and-then-existing that doesn't seem to puzzle anyone much”?
Just on a personal level, the main thing I think I've learnt over the last few weeks is that I'm better off keeping away from people who are too sure they're immortal. Somehow, now I've got that sorted out, I'm itching to get out of what's become a stuffy, claustrophobic, energy-draining atmosphere. My next bit of formal education is sorted for next year, and I think it's time I broadened my experience a bit.
We're planning to set off in a month or so, once we've got a bit of money together to start with and worked out where to go first. My mum is terribly worried, my dad thinks it'll do me no end of good but sounds a bit jealous and my brother seems to think it's a cool idea but doesn't say much about it – and I'm starting to feel excited at the prospect, the sheer size of the world outside waking me up like a gust of fresh air, making it feel good to be alive.
I want to see a bit of the world – the real world, whatever that turns out to mean: I've had enough of hypothetical maybe-existing ones. My version of exploring parallel realities will be concerned entirely with worlds that definitely exist, and where I'm not dead in any of them. I need to go to places where people's concerns are more immediate and live a bit of full-on life on the assumption that all these immortality-wishers are wrong and this is the only life we get. I can't wait to get started.