Countdown

 

Countdown

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Helen got the telephone call that her Da was dead she was curled up on one end of the couch watching Countdown, painting her toenails post-box red. Initially, she thought it would be another of those nuisance phone calls she had been getting. Her strategy had been to let the phone ring out. Later she checked the number, but then she had missed an appointment with Mr Jervis at the Queen Elizabeth. She had cursed, begged and pleaded. Mr Jervis saw that as a sign her hormones needed tweaked. That set her back six months. Picking up the receiver now, she favoured the silent treatment, cradling it against her ear and waiting. It was as if she didn’t exist, could have been anybody, but right away she recognised her wee brother John’s voice. She balanced the nail varnish brush on the arm of the couch. Then thought better of it and placed it on the real-wood floor. She expected to be upset, and more emotional about the news.

            ‘Does Mum want me to come to the funeral?’ she asked.

            The clock was ticking down in that cartoon way on Countdown. Nick Hewer was peering at the two contestants, one a housewife from Surrey –who was ahead— the other a retired policeman from Newcastle. Rachael Riley was too pretty for the job of replacing Carol Vorderman, but she filled in the gaps in the same way. She stood smiling at the whiteboard with pen in hand. Helen wanted to grow her hair out just like hers. And Rachel’s makeup, she had to admit, was superb. Her face was squarer than oval, but she did not have the mannish shoulders of Carol. The clothes both game show hosts wore that was the real secret. Everyone knew that.  The random- target number was 679. Helen had worked out the best solution from the six numbers almost instantaneously. That kind of thing ran in the family. The glass coffee table was cluttered with a box of paper hankies, a Kindle and a paperback book face down on top of another paperback book,  both of which she kept meaning to finish. She leaned and slid over the remote for the telly with her fingertips. Stopping the timer on the telly she froze the two contestants.  

            ‘You’re making me nervous.’ Helen smelt the squib fragrance of Channel.   With the back of her hand she felt heat glowing from her cheeks. The doctor checked her medication and said that would pass with time, not to get so anxious, but she wasn’t so sure.  ‘You gonnae answer?’ she asked her brother.  

            ‘It’s no’ up to me,’ said John. ‘It’s up to you.’

            ‘Fuck off.’ She banged the received down on the cradle, watching it like a cat that had let go of a field mouse. The remote was still in her other hand and she wondered how it had got there. Her breasts felt sore and her blouse damp. She took a deep breath stood up and flicked the telly off. The guttural echo of city gulls wheeling on updrafts, picking clean pavements, merged with sounds of traffic on Dumbarton Road below, bubbling up and filling the vacuum. It was too early for bed, sleep as near as Rome, but she shuffled through to the bathroom. In the bedroom she pulled the blankets up over her ears. The phone began to ring, but she lacked the energy to get up and answer it.  The line went dead.

            The following morning, she brushed and flossed her teeth, taking extra care with her makeup, blotting the end of the lipstick with toilet roll, fussing, wasting time because her jaw looked too big in the mirror. Her hair was shoulder-length now and in the fluorescent light looked purple rather than the dark Lana Turner colour she hoped for.

            She had already laid out all her clothes. Nothing special just a white blouse with wide lacy cuffs, a smart new two-piece black suit. Sensible black shoes. Dwarfing her brother John wasn’t part of the plan, but an added bonus. Her make-up already in the patent-leather bag.  Wanting to make the right impression she took her time getting ready.

Digging deep into her bag, checking for purse and keys, she quickly squished a shower of perfume over her hair and clothes before she opened the front door, when the phone rang.

‘I thought you weren’t goin’ to answer,’ her mother said on the other end of the line.

Helen heard a radio blaring in the background and the sound of children squabbling. ‘Where are you Mum?’

‘Just here,’ she ignored her question and carried straight on. ‘I know you and your dad had you differences.’

Helen cut in, didn’t give her time to finish. ‘He said it would have been best if I was never born. That it wasn’t Halloween. That it would be better if I was dead. In fact, I was dead to him.’

‘Aye, I know all that, but it doesnae mean he didnae love you.’

‘Mum I’m right here. I’ve never been anywhere else. Why didn’t he tell me this himself?’ Helen’s hands began to shake and, despite herself, she began to cry, ruining her mascara. She sat sideways on the edge of the couch.

‘He did. He told me and it’s the same thing.’

She could hear her mum blubbing on the other end of the line and it ripped her in half. ‘Where are you?’ she eventually asked, but getting no answer she added, ‘You at John’s? Put him on.’  

Helen heard the tinny sound of a Christmas song in the background then John’s gruff voice. ‘Whit have you upset Mum for again?’

‘Will you be quiet for a minute and just listen?’

‘Whit?’ he said after a few seconds.

‘You know Dad said nothing can come from nothing.’

‘Aye,’ he edged into the conversation as if Helen was holding a gun to his head and became garrulous as a man asked his last request. ‘He said a lot of things. Did a lot of things. Got him diddly-squat. He was the one with all the brains. Ran in a straight line from Granddad to Dad and took a detour round me to hit you pie in the eye.’

‘I wouldn’t say that, you’ve done well for yourself.’ 

Helen heard him chuckling on the other end of the phone, and somehow she could see a smile tugging up the end of his mouth. His tone was warmer, notching up a gear.

‘Aye, gift of the gab, useful in my line of work. According to Da, Granddad claimed he lost his leg during the First World War. Was forever banging on about a part of him was in foreign fields when, in fact, he fell over drunk and a tram went over his legs. He was able to set up a little business fixing all kinds of machinery with the compensation, but he drunk that too.’   

‘I didn’t know that,’ Helen cut in, ‘but you know Dad did meet Einstein. Well not meet-meet him, but he did attend a lecture Einstein gave at Glasgow University before the war. He was Dux of the school and scored 100%, the highest mark on some Math exam some nobs set for all of the schools in Scotland.’

‘Jesus, I never knew that,’ said John.

She heard him taking a deep breath before he spoke again.

‘Why didn’t he get a better job?’

‘Talk sense.’ She held the receiver away from her ear and rocked back and forth before speaking again. ‘He’s got six brothers. Three sisters. His dad’s from Letterkenny. What kind of job do you think they’re going to give him? He’s lucky and got a job sweeping up in the yards before he’s thirteen. That was him. That’s what he did. Didn’t complain. Just got on with it. But you know this, he could have been another Einstein. When he was nine he’d already worked out infinity was not uniform, not absolute, relative. He spewed out some nonsense about the pre-infinite infinite waiting to be born in the big bang is like the infinite, but beyond the comprehension of the human mind to understand. Probably got a whack on the heid for it. Everything is itself, but only fixed in relation to something else.’ Her voice rode up a notch. ‘You know what I mean?’

‘Wait a wee minute.’

The line became muffled. She heard her brother shouting. ‘Put that down now Jody or I’ll give you whit for?’  She heard him breathing again as if he’d run a race. ‘Sorry about that. You were saying…oh, right, something about the way you got to be what you are, or something?’

‘No I was saying that Dad didn’t get a chance to be what he should have been and I’m not willing to let that happen to me.’

She heard him sucking in air. ‘It killed Dad. You know that don’t you?’

Trying to keep her voice even she swallowed, and kneaded her jaw with her fingers, feeling the bloom of little hairs that had escaped her razor. ‘If anything killed him it was all those years when I had to live a lie. And he encouraged me in it. He wanted me to be him. The great mathematician.  Truth will out. Even Einstein had affairs, made mistakes, couldn’t fathom that at a quantum level “ghostly entanglement” as he called it meant that some things when observed travelled faster than the speed of light, yet seem to be outside the laws of light and time, so that mirroring takes place infinites apart. That perhaps in a parallel universe, a woman, me but not me, is waiting for sexual reassignment surgery, and is on the phone talking to her sister about her mother’s death.’

Helen heard the phone go dead.