Subjects, p.1
Subjects, page 1
First published in Great Britain in 2024 by
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Copyright © 2024 Gillian Twine
The right of Gillian Twine to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This work is entirely fictitious and bears no resemblance to any persons living or dead.
ISBN 978 1835741 207
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
To everyone who helped along the way
Contents
Part One
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Part Two
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Part Three
Prologue
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
About The Author
Part One
RESEARCH
GENERAL KNOWLEDGE
One
Monday, 4 January 2016
She clung to the wheel like a seasick passenger, head sunk into the billowy white folds. Behind, three heads bowed down and bobbed back up, brushing the seat backs with their wiry curls, then hung like startled marionettes, rocking slightly in the quiet air. Unanswered questions rolled around the car.
She dragged her face with dread around to see. Curiosity shaken out of them: struck dumb with surprise. Silenced at last but breathing still.
Christ Almighty. She could have killed them all.
‘What happened, Mummy?’ Isaac, five, shocked to see the air bag pop right out.
‘Did someone hit us?’ Tim, ten, keen to find the enemy.
‘Are you OK?’ Florence, fourteen, caring, calm. Reaching between the seats to press the hazards on. Gently turning off the ignition key.
‘I don’t know,’ Sofia said in a cracked whisper. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ she confessed.
*
She sat on the cold curb, feeling sick and stupid, as the boys scuffed stones into the bollard bent double by the bumper in its belly. Drivers squeezed past the island with its new metallic centrepiece, irritated once they saw no one was hurt. Then Florence was on her phone, sorting things already, describing their location by the muddy roundabout.
‘Gardener as in Gardener?’ The historic market town police were there already, quick to cross from their headquarters three safe streets away.
‘No, like guard,’ said Isaac.
‘Without the “u”,’ said Tim.
Wearily, resignedly, Sofia spelled it out.
‘Dates of birth?’ The children rolled theirs off. Sofia had to concentrate. ‘Bumps or bleeding? Any pain at all? Stiffness to the neck?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said dully, feeling only nausea.
‘Any other vehicles involved, ma’am? Anyone left the scene?’
Sofia hung her head and stared at her sock, where the heel had worked right up to form an air-filled hillock on the side of her ankle.
The traffic officer pressed on. ‘Any idea at all what might have caused the collision, madam? Something in the road, perhaps? Mechanical fault? Any problems with seizures? History of blackouts?’
Sofia pushed the bubble in slowly, making a dimple on the top.
He made one last effort, squatting on his haunches with his tablet and his pen. ‘Can you tell us anything at all about what happened, Mrs Gardner?’
Isaac was jumping up and down. ‘There was a big bang and—’
‘What sort of speed do you think you were doing?’
‘We swerved like this,’ Tim enacted the motion for his brother.
‘Thirty,’ said Florence quickly. ‘She never does more than thirty.’
The officer stood up again. ‘That’s quite a lick, young lady, to be approaching a roundabout.’
‘No, I mean she wasn’t going fast. She never speeds. She doesn’t.’
Sofia became agitated and started to explain. ‘We went off course. I don’t know why. I had to twist the wheel. The children: they need a check. It shook them. Banged their heads.’
Then she passed out, her head between her legs.
Two
Friday, 11 December 2015
‘Hugo! Hugo! Hugo! Hugo!’ The beery chants went thumping through her brain. He looked at her, helpless but happy, captured by the resident Meerkats, their heads up for the Christmas final. The locals had needed fresh blood: an educated incomer on their team, to even out the numbers and boost their jackpot score, and Hugo had, as ever, been generous with his expertise.
The Spangles were three old school friends visiting for the night. They’d kept her on their side to balance out his intellect. You went to university. You ought to know your stuff. So creative too, you are, left brained to his right. He’ll be OK without you. He’s loving it, you see. We need someone with A levels, and a degree. Annie, Bea and Kay had followed a different road but found their fortunes none the less. Now they were back, to reinvent old times, jolly their hosts to the nearest bar and subtly recalibrate their relative success.
The house was nice, they had observed. Wreath on the knocker. Double garage. Ice on the little pond. There was clearly money in that research he did. Shame about the car and his haphazard sense of dress. But he was in his element, firing off answers without pause for breath, still attractive as he scrunched the sandy whorls of his chaotic fringe, half the explanation for his offspring’s striking hair.
But she? She seemed already defeated somehow. Not the vibrant, clever, A-team girl with tightly buoyant curls, who’d swept the board at prize day, edited the sixth form news and made them envious. They sipped at their Prosecco; rubbed the sparkles on their nails. They’d lost touch with the combatants: hardly seen them since the wedding almost sixteen years ago. But the marriage of minds between the ex-deputy head girl and her partner was still a source of fascination. This would be a tournament worth seeing, they were sure.
Sofia smoothed her stupid skirt down over her thighs. She hadn’t bargained on being hoisted up onto a bar stool, with tinsel round her neck. The first round the girls covered her: TV Serials, Sporting Stars and Top Ten Festive Hits. Easy pickings for them but from that trove of popular culture which had somehow passed her by. Now it was science and nature, her area, the reason she’d been picked. Hugo looked across, oddly comfortable with strangers, pleasantly confident in battle.
What does RNA stand for?
Candy for a post-grad biochemist. The Meerkats must have got that one.
What acid is used in fizzy drinks and baking powders?
He’d known that one since primary school. She knew it because she cooked. Then she struck lucky with questions from her own specialty. Operant conditioning. Gestalt theory. Dermatophobia. The friends were left behind, impressed, and she had found her way. Hit singles might have stumped her, but she knew about the human mind, the workings of the brain.
Trays of mince pies went clockwise when it was time to check the scores, and papers went the other way, swapped between the teams. The Spangles leapt upon the Meerkats’ sheet. Sofia was glad only the Snowmen could read what she had written. She’d gone cold to see the correct responses, all in Hugo’s hand. That was her field, the things she knew. She hadn’t known he knew them too.
Meerkats and Spangles tied joint first. Mulled wine on the house. Hugo’s encyclopaedic abstract knowledge and the locals’ in-depth love of sport could not quite compensate for the Spangles’ superb performance in music and TV trivia and Hugo’s bafflement at logo rounds: he paid scant attention to the labels on his jumpers or his car. Sofia wasn’t sure if she had helped the score. The years of university, the research, the MA. It seemed they’d made no difference in the end at all.
The girls still had a use for her. ‘Jackpot! Jackpot round! You be it! Come on!’ They lifted her and the high stool to a new arena in front of the bar, handling her with intimacy borne of too much wine, retying the tinsel to make a scarlet crown. She moved awkwardly from buttock to buttock, shuffling herself back to keep her skirt hem forward, laughing in a panic and flicking back incorrigible springs of auburn hair.
The other masterminds were pushed forward too. Hugo was relaxed; his legs draped easily to the floor. The lead Snowman found his Christmas jumper tight under his bomber jacket and struggled to climb up on his stool holding his pint of beer. Nine rollover questions, picked from a hat, three for each team. A tiebreak question if required. First to shout it out. The jackpot stood at £70. A round of drinks at least.
Sofia hadn’t had a drop. She couldn’t fail tonight, not in front of her past. They only knew her former schoolgirl self. Composed. Intelligent. Naturally good-looking. Trained in all the disciplines. Maybe, she hated to think it now, slightly superior. She assumed the dazzling smile she thought she might have worn back then.
The barman tinkled for silence with a spoon against a glass.
‘OK, ladies and gents. Buckle your seatbelts for the final jackpot round. Seventy pounds in the pot, ladies and gentlemen, which cannot, I repeat cannot, be carried over into the new year, plus free tickets for our Christmas Draw in just one week’s time. So, without further ado, three questions for each team, selected at random by our lovely assistant here.’ He ruffled the hair of a black-aproned youth, wearing a Santa hat and holding a lidded ice bucket filled with folded slips: yellow for geography and history, red for sport and entertainment and green for both their specialties – science and nature.
‘OK, Meerkats,’ the barman cleared his throat, ‘here we go. There are two Christmas islands. Name the oceans in which they are located.
‘In which century is Star Trek set?
‘By what common household name and initials do we know trichlorophenylmethyliodosalicyl?’
Hugo’s new-found followers leaned forward to whisper in his ear, but he’d answered every question before it left the barman’s mouth. They weren’t difficult, Sofia told herself. Two and three were a gift for a serious scientist with a love of sci-fi comedy, and a man who travelled the world as much as Hugo must surely know his famous archipelagos from the air.
The Abominable Snowman fared less well. Yore One Yawn is an anagram of which famous sportsperson? yielded Rooney straightaway, and with a little help from his friends, he came up with shoulder blade as the common name for the scapula bone. But when asked for the names of the three wise men in western folklore, his tongue got the better of him. After a great inner struggle, he came out with Balthasar, Caspar and Myrrh. No one had thought to help him. Broca’s aphasia perhaps, Sofia thought privately, although he seemed too fluent for that. He knew what he’d done straightaway, clasping his face and thumping a frustrated fist into his thigh, and acknowledged defeat with a chivalrous bow as he dragged his stool back into the crowd.
It was the turn of the Spangles again.
‘What is the capital of Sicily?
‘Whose album X was a hit in 2014?
‘The scientific name for which well-known extinct creature means “rapid thief” when translated?’
Sofia looked around helplessly. Luckily, Kay had been to Palermo on holiday. Bea was a Sheeran fan. For the third question, Sofia cast her mind back to Tim’s bedroom. Extinct creatures, in the form of dinosaurs, were very much his thing. It had to be one of them. Her brain clicked through the possibilities. Rapid. Speedy. Speed. Velocity. Velociraptor.
It shot out of her mouth, and she smiled, surprised at herself. They’d done it. She’d done it. Saved face in front of everyone. And now it was just her and him. The tiebreak. No conferring.
‘Hugo! Hugo! You go! Hugo!’
‘Sofia! Sofia! Sophea! Sphere!’
The chants began, mutating in a marinade of cider, beer and wine. Then the whole pub was swaying, leering, cheering. Bawling Christmas hit lines with amiable hooliganism. The killer question might be on anything at all, lurking in the ice bucket for several weeks gone by. The barman tinkled the glass and raised his fist to quiet the din.
‘OK, ladies and gents, this is it. For the ultimate prize – a seventy-pound jackpot and free tickets to our Christmas Draw – the tiebreak question is…’ He paused for an uncomfortably lengthy stretch of time, copying the format of a thousand talent shows. There was some artificial coughing and a whistle at the back. Then he shook the folded paper and carefully read it out.
‘Retrograde, infantile and anterograde are all forms of what?’
Hugo paused for a second. Not his area, not at all, but his scientific life was simple and clear cut. If a person knew the answer, he came right out with it.
‘Oh, amnesia,’ he said brightly, seeing it just like that.
She should have found it funny, forgetting about memory, failing a question on her specialist subject, but she felt as if he’d shot her with a ray gun or punched her in the chest. He didn’t see, didn’t feel the stab of instantaneous deflation, as her ego imploded into total nothingness.
‘Amnesia it is, Meerkats!’ confirmed the barman in his best showman voice. ‘One seventy-pound jackpot, my good man.’ He handed over the envelope. ‘If I could just get your scribble here to show it’s been received.’ The Meerkats went wild as the Tannoy sang “Merry Christmas Everybody”. With more space and sobriety, they’d have hoisted their mascot above their heads and paraded him around. Hugo handed them the money. He’d had his pint of Speckled Hen.
Annie, Bea and Kay were shocked. This wasn’t the ending they’d expected when they started out tonight. Sofia smiled bitterly and gulped saliva over the molten barrier rising in her throat. Her mouth crumpled like a child’s into an upside-down “u”. Then she brushed the sparkling crown down from her head and ran into the ladies’, to hide her face and splash away her hot and angry tears.
Three
Monday, 4 January 2016
Isaac finished building his magazine tower after one last trip to the coffee table and stepped onto the top copy of Good Housekeeping to reach the antibacterial soap.
‘Does it really kill 99% of germs, Mum?’ asked Tim. ‘Can it kill nearly everything? Can it kill cancer and stuff like that?’
‘If it kills everything,’ said Isaac slowly, ‘why don’t they just give it to all the patients?’
‘Pschew pschew pchew!’ Tim shot an imaginary gel-gun around the waiting room.
‘It doesn’t kill diseases,’ said Florence. ‘Don’t do that, Isaac, please.’ She pulled him away from the pump, under which he was waiting with open mouth. ‘It only kills microbes, and the most dangerous ones it doesn’t even kill at all.’
‘So why do they bother?’ started Tim.
Isaac climbed up on the boxy nylon armchair to have another go. ‘Don’t do that,’ said Florence more sharply. ‘The nurse is watching you – and the doctor in that room.’ Isaac slid away across the floor and knelt in front of Sofia.
‘Are they going to ask us lots of questions, Mummy?’
Sofia tried to lift her eyes up from her lap. Her stomach twitched. She’d had enough of questions.
‘Oh yeah, I know what they ask,’ said Tim. ‘I’ve seen it on TV when you bang your head and stuff. “What’s your name? What day is it? When did World War One start? Who’s the prime minister?” I bet I get 100%.’ He sat like a frog under the noticeboard, reaching to flick a leaflet pinned above his head.
‘Do you know who the prime minister is, Isaac?’ asked Florence brightly, trying to distract him as he shuffled across the disinfected floor. ‘Do you think you’d pass the test?’
Sofia felt a numb pain, a cold iron pressing on her sternum. She knew that one. But what about the others? Describe a recent news event. Explain the background to the Troubles. Name Henry VIII’s fifth wife. Identify the chemical element Nb. Outline the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What if she couldn’t answer? What if she didn’t know?
