The Unhappy Medium, page 9
Living Physics was on the fringe end of the science rags, and to Newton’s mind, always hard-line in such matters, one of the most flaky. The editors had been inclined to run every offbeat theory on the shape of the universe that was offered to them and were therefore seen by the elite, to which Newton once proudly belonged, as more geek than academic. An old friend from college, Denise Garrand, had been its managing editor for years. She took pity on Newton and sought him out, holed up in his Crouch End flat, unshaven and dabbling with a badly written account of his downfall.
‘Bloody hell Newton,’ she’d exclaimed as he opened the door, his just-out-of-bed eyes and bleary stubble at odds with the 3pm chimes of the nearby clock tower. ‘Mind if I come in?’ Newton fumbled for a suitable escape line but Denise pushed past him into the darkened flat. ‘Ewwww nice,’ she muttered as she stepped over the socks, newspaper cuttings and empty supermarket whisky bottles. ‘I love what you haven’t done with the place.’
‘Sorry, bit of a mess,’ Newton awkwardly admitted. He tried to kick one of the more offending items behind a chair but it became stuck to his sock, making him shake his foot as if there was a small dog on the end of it.
‘Just a bit,’ Denise agreed, wincing. ‘Come on, look, get yourself buffed up and I’ll buy you a coffee.’ She went to sit down then very quickly changed her mind. ‘Right away though, if you don’t mind. I’m not sure I can be in the same room as your last five breakfasts for much longer.’
‘No, sorry, right,’ Newton said apologetically, and he backed away towards the bedroom wondering if he had any clothes that were stain-free and less than catastrophically creased. ‘I’ll be right back.’
‘It’s good to see you Newton,’ said Denise over a cappuccino a little later. ‘I’ve been wondering how you’ve been.’ She tilted her head to one side leaving a yawning gap in the conversation for Newton to fill. ‘So ... how have you been?’
‘Oh you know,’ he answered, knowing full well that she probably didn’t know the half of it but could probably guess the rest.
‘That good eh?’ she said, causing Newton to shrug in a lame attempt to appear positive. ‘Well ... it’s high time you pulled yourself out of this thing,’ said Denise, narrowing her eyes. She had always been a good friend. Newton couldn’t deny it was nice to see her.
‘I don’t want to be … like this,’ he said, staring at his spoon as he aimlessly spun the froth. ‘I guess I’m a bit …’
‘Yes, you are,’ Denise interjected, without waiting for a full verdict. ‘Look Newton, I know what happened isn’t fair, lots of us thought it was awful, really bad, but it’s in the past now. ’
‘She left me you know,’ Newton muttered. ‘Fancy a proper drink?’
‘No,’ said Denise, pushing his coffee back towards him. ‘Yes I know. It’s terribly unfair. But Newton, you have to move on.’ She sat back and looked hard at him for a second. ‘Are you working?’
‘Working … er …,’ he shuffled uncomfortably. ‘Well I am playing with the idea of writing a book actually.’ Denise sighed.
‘It wouldn’t be about you and Havotech by any chance, would it?’
‘Yes it would,’ replied Newton enthusiastically before he realised that Denise was several steps ahead of him. ‘I suppose you think that’s a bit obsessive?’
‘Yup. Also it’s pointless because you won’t finish it, futile because it wouldn’t get published and useless because even if it did, you’d be sued into atoms.’
‘You’ve got a point there,’ Newton sighed. Denise’s point-blank observations echoed the lingering feeling of ennui that had niggled him since he first had the book idea. He sagged. ‘Well what the hell am I meant to do though, really?’ His frustrated finger flicked a sachet of brown sugar across the table and down the back of a radiator. ‘I can’t sit here and just take it!’
‘Well that’s exactly what you have been doing, isn’t it? Stuck up there in less than glorious isolation letting the whole thing eat you up.’
‘True,’ said Newton flatly, admitting defeat. ‘I’m tired Denise. Look, I’ve no idea what to do next, absolutely no idea.’ He dropped his head into his folded arms and let out a long weary sigh.
‘Well in that case Newton, if you can’t do something for yourself, then you can do something for me.’ Denise nudged him and his head gradually rose back to the horizontal.
‘And what would that be then?’ he huffed.
‘We need writers, how about it?’ She let the offer hang in the air. Newton winced awkwardly.
‘Living Physics ? Me? Is that really a good idea?’
‘Yes you,’ Denise said. ‘And if you’re worried about your “dark” reputation then you don’t need to be, we can fix you up with a pen name.’
‘Oh I don’t know Denise, look I’m grateful and everything, really, but I don’t know. I’m a bit out of the loop.’ He dodged her eyes and shrugged again, rubbing his stubble and gritting his teeth to transmit his lack of motivation.
‘Don’t be silly, bright young man like you. You know the subjects back to front and upside down. Are you going to just sit there and rot, or are you going to stand up and get your life going again?’ She looked him steadily in the eye as he tried to disappear into his jacket. ‘There’s some money in it, you know … wonga.’
‘Well I could certainly use a bit of cash,’ admitted Newton. He sighed again and let his gaze drift through the window. ‘Oh what a bloody mess. I was far too cocky,’ Newton reflected. ‘I should have listened to Alex Sixsmith – if anyone predicted all this then it was him.’
‘Alex Sixsmith?’ asked Denise. ‘Oh yes, he worked with your father didn’t he?’
‘That’s the one, a family friend really, used to look out for me.’ He sat silent for a second, regret washing over him like steam. ‘I owe him a visit really, say I’m sorry.’
‘Well you’d better hurry up then,’ she said. ‘I heard he’s very ill, terminal I think.’ Newton looked stunned for a long second then quickly put on his coat. ‘Sorry,’ said Denise, ‘I thought you’d have known.’
‘I’m going to have to go.’ There was urgency in his voice and purpose in his step for the first time in years. Denise shouted after him as he ran from the cafe.
‘I’ll see you on Monday then, yeah?’ Newton’s affirmative answer merged with the sounds of the buses crawling past the clock tower. Denise pondered the wisdom of her offer for a second and then signalled a waiter for the bill. The young man watched as the frantic figure dashed off to his flat.
‘Isn’t that that bogus science dude?’ he asked.
‘That was Dr Newton Barlow,’ said Denise, and she paid for the coffees and headed back into town.
******
Newton spent most of the afternoon ringing round, furious with himself for his reclusiveness and isolation now that his mentor and friend was shuffling up to the mortal coil. He had always intended to catch up with the old boy, but Newton’s colossal pride, savaged and bruised by his downfall and subsequent decline, had prevented him from lifting the receiver. The futility of such misplaced dignity was now apparent and Newton’s urgency reflected his desperate longing to see Sixsmith and obtain something akin to absolution.
After prolonged enquiries, he finally located Sixsmith in a hospital in Eastbourne, where he had moved to be close to his sister Jennifer. Newton finally reached her, and she confirmed that Alex was indeed gravely ill, an aggressive cancer having done its worst over the last few months. Newton caught the next train.
The wait for the first visiting hours was interminable. Finally he made his way hesitantly down the corridors of the old hospital. Pausing occasionally either out of nerves or out of remorse, he wasn’t sure, he stood awkwardly as the staff and visiting families moved around him. It was almost as if he had to force himself forward. Eventually he rediscovered his locomotion and catching Sixsmith’s name on a wipe board, he prepared himself for their first meeting in many years. He was composing himself when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see a small woman, her lined face looking sadly into his eyes.
‘You must be Newton,’ she said gently and with composure. He caught his breath.
‘Yes, yes I am. You must be Alex’s sister,’ he replied, tripping awkwardly on the words.
‘Yes dear,’ she continued, ‘but I’m so very sorry, you’ve arrived a bit too late. Alex passed away about an hour ago.’ She smiled sweetly. In her frail hands she was holding Sixsmith’s half-moon spectacles. ‘And he was so looking forward to seeing you again.’
‘Oh,’ said Newton, winded. ‘Ohhh.’ He sat down heavily in a wheelchair. For the first time in the long sad saga of his decline and fall, Newton Barlow began to cry.
******
The funeral of Dr Sixsmith back in London a week later was a no-nonsense affair, the non-descript suburban crematorium echoing Alex’s lifetime avoidance of pretention and drama. The humanist service was devoid of any of the religious trappings the scientist had found so irritating and pointless. He had wanted to die sure in the knowledge that his existence would be firmly at an end, something he had always declared as a perfectly acceptable state of affairs.
Newton hung back at the service and cremation, keen to avoid any awkward encounters with the gathered luminaries. Alex’s sister smiled warmly at Newton, too old and realistic to be emotional at her brother’s passing despite the apparent absence of any other family members to offer condolences.
Outside, the rain slanted near horizontal as the early evening arrived and Newton, realising that his car was nearly as close to collapse as he was, began to dread the journey home. True to form, the dear old Citroën refused to start. Newton trudged wearily home on public transport, his mood as black as the evening. Through the rain-streaked windows, he watched the houses slowly passing as the bus fought its way back through rush-hour traffic. Back in his flat, he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. The sad, wet scarecrow staring back finally got too much and Newton, sick of himself, sick of his problems and sick of his reputation, took out his electric razor, erected the ironing board and put on a wash. He took his old leather jacket out of the wardrobe. Dusting off the epaulets, he decided that the time had come to pull himself together.
******
The Monday morning editorial meeting at Living Physics was a quiet affair, less Washington Post and more parish magazine. Its somewhat fringe status ensured that its editors and writers were quirky, cynical or resigned. They were keeping Newton at a certain distance, well aware of his recent past and complex status. Newton, still deeply pragmatic at heart, struggled with the whacky stories and geeky takes on his beloved physics and struggled even harder to prevent himself from snorting cynically at the stories under discussion. So he was soon put in his place in no short order by the hacks and enthusiasts around the table, none too keen to be cross-questioned or belittled by the new arrival. He made an easy target, of course, and stung for hours after each meeting.
In time, though, he settled down to the extent that he started to lose himself in the fluffy stories and forget his old zealotry. He began to enjoy representing himself with a pen name, the lofty sounding ‘Kenton Sussex’, and even started to receive a trickle of mail from his audience, some complimentary, some critical and a large proportion utterly and bafflingly weird: men who could communicate with other worlds via talking squirrels, an Aztec spaceman living quietly in Barnes and a charming lady from Leyton Buzzard who sent Newton small framed pictures of her buttocks.
Inevitably, his return to his old style meant that he was starting to get recognised again, but the old horrors seemed remote enough that it was a price worth paying. Gradually he was getting back some semblance of self-respect, and Denise, who’d done so much to resurrect her old friend, decided that the time was right to bring up the thorny subject of dating.
‘Oh hell, I don’t know Denise, I don’t know if I’m ready,’ he said over a pint after work. ‘It’s still too soon.’
‘Too soon? It’s been years Newton, don’t be soft.’ With characteristic ease, she’d put Newton on the back foot once again.
‘What do you suggest then? I take it you have a long list of frustrated thirty-somethings up your sleeve?’
‘What my lot?’ Denise replied laughing. ‘You’ve got to be kidding, they’re bonkers, all of them. Besides you’re hardly what they’d have in mind either, much too complicated. They don’t mind being complex and insane themselves, they just don’t want to see any of that in anyone else.’ She smiled conspiratorially. ‘No, I reckon you should do your dating online.’ Newton let out another weary sigh. He shook his head slowly and obviously in the hope Denise would drop the subject. She was having none of it. ‘Sure, why not? Everyone’s doing it now.’
‘My point entirely,’ said Newton, visualising a seething mass of crazies, fingers twitching above mouse buttons waiting for fresh meat. ‘I think I’m happy to just wait until I bump into someone I like.’
‘Yeah right, like that’s going to happen,’ said Denise. ‘At least by doing the whole online dating thing you can get to meet someone you genuinely get on with. Someone who shares a lot in common with you.’
‘Ah divorced!’ Newton snorted.
‘No not that,’ Denise corrected firmly. ‘Although you do need to be realistic – you are in your late thirties, and anyone without baggage at that age has probably never lived.’ She looked into Newton’s tired eyes, looking to see past his current avalanche of defeatism. ‘You don’t really want to spend the rest of your life on your own do you Newton?’ He would have loved to have said yes, but he couldn’t. The empty flat and the lack of companionship were wearing very thin. Whether he wanted to admit it or not, he was longing for something – maybe romance, or maybe something more physical. It might have just been having someone around who made him wash his socks before putting them back on again.
‘OK,’ he sighed. ‘What do I have to do?’
******
Having signed himself up to Denise’s recommended singles site, the tragically named Onehandclapping.com, Newton uploaded a somewhat ageing picture of himself he’d grabbed from a website about scientific scandals. In the absence of anything better to do on a winter’s evening, he sat back and waited for a response. It wasn’t long in coming. Around 20 minutes later some two hundred prowling singles had scent-marked his personal details, trailing their coats with a wave of ‘Hi you’, ‘Well hello!’ or the evergreen ‘Are you new here?’ Newton wasn’t sure how to respond, so he ran out to the supermarket and bought himself a large bottle of Merlot.
When he got back, the nudges, prods and pokes had risen to somewhere in the low thousands. Quickly loosing perspective under the corrosive effect of a litre of red, he tentatively replied to a few of the messages to see what would happen. Back came the responses: a long account of a break-up with an insurance negotiator called Carl; a series of mercifully out-of-focus underwear shots; a list of dirty, cheap hotel rooms in the greater Manchester conurbation (weekdays, 11am to 3pm, no baldies, must be clean). It was a disappointing first encounter but as the night stretched on, he decided to make his own approaches rather than sit there waiting. He began to make better headway. For a start, there were a large number of professional women, probably waking up in a good position at work and a lonely flat at home after years of dedicated and fruitful employment. Doctors, architects, publishing directors ... Newton felt drawn more to these independent women than the initial surge of wallet-watchers and needy frumps who had got their oar in first.
Sometimes, he had moments of vertigo and ran off to read a book or listen to loud boyish music on his iPod. But each time he’d felt compelled to drift back to the keyboard to see if anything new had happened, which of course, most of the time, it had. But he kept his romantic firewall up to its maximum, resisting contacting some of the more managerial faces, who, despite their best efforts, could not look kittenish unless someone had staple-gunned a young Siamese cat to their foreheads.
He wavered back and forth. Too scientific, not scientific enough. Too kind looking, not kindly enough. Lives too close, lives too far away. He finally conked out about three in the morning, too tired even to block yet another approach from Sylvia in Woking who had amassed a valuable collection of Garfield ephemera in her one-bedroom flat and who needed a good seeing-to.
The morning produced a mass of new responses that made Newton inexcusably late for the production meeting.
‘Said you’d enjoy it!’ Denise teased. ‘Any dates yet?’
‘God no,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of nuts out there.’ But he was already stuck on the conveyor belt, just as Denise knew he would be.
‘Then you should fit in nicely,’ Denise laughed. ‘Seriously though Newton, don’t be so judgemental. They’re just people like you, all having their ups and downs. Cut them some slack.’
That evening, he kept her words in mind as he sat, more soberly this time, promising to commit to setting up a few dates to test the water. Keeping a typically scientific approach, he decided to hedge his bets on a spread of types: scientific, not scientific; vampish or down to earth; over and under confident.
At 2am, with several dates arranged, Newton crawled into bed filled with a strange mixture of teenage excitement and adult apprehension.
******
Seeing Samantha, Belinda, Jane, Tabby, Jo, Julie and Sarah proved something of an assault course. Samantha was confident, independent, a distinguished biochemist. She was nice at first, but increasingly dismissive as she twigged Newton’s circumstances. She was old-school enough, though, to expect him to pay for the moules marinière.
