This time I don’t flee. I simply turn, and walk back down the stairs. Pumpkin, the ginger tabby, weaves between my legs as if to see me out, or possibly to hasten my departure by tripping me on the staircase. I have a vague impression of Colin, Raj and Ryan, silent in their warm lounge, their game of Trivial Pursuit abandoned. Distantly, I think I hear one of them call out after me.
The street is damp and dark. I walk, my focus absorbed by the uneven footpath. I count in a Fibonacci sequence, always my go-to pattern when I was little, as comforting as the sheep Mum told me other kids count to help them sleep.
The drizzle has turned into a downpour, which soaks my green dress through. I realise, as I stumble over my count, that somehow in this crap-storm of a night I have lost my copy of Six Easy Pieces, which, yes, I was carrying to a party inside my jacket pocket.
I think it’s the loss of the book that finally breaks whatever spell was holding me together. Breathing is rapidly becoming problematic.
I lie down on the nature strip, my forehead in the grass. It smells of dirt and wet green, but I breathe it in as if this earthly connection can resynchronise my body and disconnected brain. My entire world is reduced to filling my lungs. I wonder if this is what Houdini felt, right before he burst free from his water torture cell. The fact that this knowledge is now embedded in my brain is unutterably distressing.
I don’t know how long I remain horizontal. Eventually I am so numb and cold that something in my hindbrain sparks to life, reminding me that a wretched evening is still no justification for hypothermia. I sit up, and realise I’ve been lying in a murky puddle of brown water, which has left two boob-shaped circles on the front of my dress.
I pull out my mobile, blurring my eyes against the multiple missed call notifications, all from the one number. I fumble for my contacts, and I call the only person I can safely assume is also friendless and alone on a Saturday night. Though my throat is still locked, I managed to croak out my location. Then I bury my face in my knees and totally fail to cry.
Toby’s Corolla pulls up to the curb with a very un-Toby-like tyre squeal. I drag my face up to see his bespectacled eyes scanning frantically through the windscreen. He’s out the door and across the road, only checking both ways twice, which is how I know this is a crisis.
Toby skids to a stop. He drops onto one knee, right there on the roadside. I stare at his kneecaps, the damp already soaking his pyjama bottoms.
‘Sophia, are you hurt?’ he barks. ‘What happened?’
I open my mouth. Strangely, all I have been able to think about for the fifteen minutes since I called Toby is Richard Feynman. How he hated studying English, detested the rules of language. He knew it was nothing but imprecise human conventions, arbitrary, made-up vagaries that had nothing to do with anything real. This phrase keeps floating through my head, in Feynman’s twangy voice: there is a difference between knowing the name of something, and knowing something. I suppose he meant that not having the words for a thing doesn’t make it any less true or real.
‘Did you not think to put on pants?’ I ask out loud.
Toby’s face furrows. ‘No. I didn’t.’
He stumbles as he stands, then reaches down and pulls me up, his hand briefly under my arm, though he lets go quickly as I wobble to my feet. Whatever he sees as his gaze runs over me renders his face less frantic. It sinks slowly back into its usual mask of blankness and irritation.
‘If this is one of your episodes or whatever, you should’ve called Mum or Dad. I’ve got half a dozen assignments that aren’t becoming un-terrible by themselves.’ He looks around the street as if only now realising that he is outside.
‘Toby, do you think I’m a horrible person? It’s okay if you say yes. I’d just really like to stop trying to guess what’s in your head.’
Toby slicks a hunk of dripping hair from his eyes. He shakes off his parka and all but throws it over my shoulders. ‘God, I don’t have time for this,’ he mutters.
Warm fabric wraps around my torso, enveloping me in a faint cloud of home-smells. ‘You don’t have time for me?’ For a second I think my voice almost manages to break free of its monotone.
And for just the briefest second, I think I see something pass over my brother’s face. It’s gone too quickly for me to identify. ‘I don’t have time for teenage dramatics or whatever this is,’ he says uncertainly. ‘If, well – did something happen that I should know about?’
Facts form an orderly queue inside my head. It’s almost welcome, this ability of mine to systematise and classify, even now, when I am so bone tired that the bed of damp grass at my feet looks appealing. I seem to have lost my will to speak, though. I shake my head.
Toby gathers my discarded bag and thrusts it into my hands. ‘Right. Then let’s go. Get in the car, Sophia.’
I figure I might as well follow a directive. Perhaps this is where my future lies – blindly observing orders, using my skills for whatever I am told to do with them. Like those mathematicians who cracked the Enigma code, but the underlings with names nobody remembers.
I huddle in the passenger seat. Toby fiddles with the heating, cranking the temperature and aiming a vent my way.
‘Put your seatbelt on,’ he growls.
I look over at him as I click my belt into place. Dishevelled and damp, he flicks on his wipers, but he doesn’t pull out into the traffic until he has slicked back his hair and untucked an errant bit of his pyjama shirt collar. It’s like he can’t move forward until he has smoothed and straightened himself into place.
I wonder if a hug from my brother would trigger my anxious touch response? Most likely, all higher brain functions would cease, rendered catatonic from shock. I don’t think I have ever giggled in my life, but I have this sudden flash of Toby attempting to hug me with those spindly arms that he once sprained trying to hang fairy lights on our Christmas tree, and it almost sends me into hysterics.
I face the road, deciding to focus solely on the windscreen wipers. I am unable to process anything more tonight.
I rub a hand over my chest. Somewhere beyond the pounding palpitations, it hurts. Fact: My heart is only the size of a fist, but is capable of pumping blood through the one hundred thousand miles of vessels that cascade through my body. I know it is still doing its job. If I were prone to hyperbole, though, I could almost imagine that my heart has given up on me too.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The observation of black holes
Suffice to say, everything sucks. Everything sucks diseased monkey balls, on the body of a vivisected lab monkey, in the lab of a scientist plagued by chlamydia.