Naomi Wood

Ghosts

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Pia threw her jacket and bag onto the back seat. The car had a mushroomy smell, as if, unattended for the day, something might have started growing in the upholstery seams. It was this heat; so late in September.
But Pia kept the windows up; it felt safer like that.
As she circled the car park, Pia caught the measured voice of the Radio 4 newsreader. “Today, scientists across the world are facing a revolution in physics. Neutrinos – ghostly subatomic particles, which pass through our bodies all the time – have broken the universe’s fundamental speed limit: the speed of light.”
The story continued as she queued for the exit with all the other lecturers in their little cars. The newsreader kept on using the word ghostly, which Pia found odd, since it seemed to suggest a life, a death, and a botched resurrection – a metaphor she didn’t think scientists would like. She wondered how many of these particles had ghosted through her this morning, as she had shovelled the coffee into the cafetière, broken the eggs into the warming pan, pegged the laundry to the clothesline. How quickly, she wondered, did they whizz through hair, scalp, cranial vault, brain tissue? And she wondered, too, if their course might be slowed by the cloudy melancholia that had descended on her today, on the morning of her fortieth birthday. Free of the car-park, Pia executed her Fiat Punto through a cute right turn and headed towards Bethnal
Green. She supposed that these subatomic bits would still be travelling through her, at guileless and impressive zoom through skin, membrane, and into the car’s upholstery, even as she travelled at a speed which, she saw from the speedometer, was over the limit. Now she rolled down the window and a hot breeze streamed in. Autumn had gone backwards into summer, and the trees’ rusted leaves once again cupped a whole heap of heat. It must be sending the animals nuts.
Perhaps she should call Daniel and ask him to delay their restaurant booking. But then she would have to stop the car to make the phone call, and irritation – that faint thrill of the world not behaving quite to her liking – was in her. Pia pressed the accelerator, moving the car along Mare Street noticing the children’s drawings overhanging the traffic lights. There were pictures of snails and tortoises, accompanied by exquisitely pathetic lettering, urging motorists to SLO DOWN! Pia grinned through their commandments speeding up.
She was dying, really, to be at home; it had been a day that had felt longer than its eight hours. The melancholy that had met her this morning was no better for it being expected; all year she had been dreading the time when she would, irrevocably, turn forty. All year, in fact, she’d felt rather hollowed-out.
Where did it come from? This feeling of constant fatigue? Pia felt sleep-deprived and yet she was sleeping more than ever. Perhaps she was depressed – as if what the neutrinos were travelling through was indeed a soggy toilet-roll of sad brain tissue. She could be depressed; Daniel had said she had a proclivity towards depression which she always thought was a sweet way of expressing it, as if it were a penchant for chocolate, or ice-cream.
Pia was now doing forty in a thirty zone but she knew there were no cameras here. Expecting the traffic to be better, she took the earlier exit at Queensbridge rather than Kingsland Road; it wasn’t. The feeling was a kind of bereavement, that was it: to be facing a time so loosened from any expectation of joy.
Despite some of her bluer moods Pia had essentially been a person of optimism. Today, there was only a singular feeling that everything worth happening had already happened.
Some of the shops were still boarded up after the August riots: a pawn shop, a sportswear store, an offlicence. It hadn’t just been kids this summer, it had been adults, too, playing at this childish game of consequence-less theft. What a strange year, this; adults regressing into childhood; autumn reverting to summer; neutrinos overtaking the speed of light, time going backwards; all this as Pia, at forty, raced toward her grave.

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When she hit Dalston Junction she turned up the radio. The newsreader’s accent was flat and colourless.
“... Neutrinos travelling the seven hundred and thirty kilometre journey from the CERN Institute in France to the Gran Sasso Institute in Italy arrived sixty nanoseconds earlier than they would have if they had been travelling at light speed.” Pia slipped into the left lane, only to be frustrated by a large London bus that felt the need to take up two. “If their findings are correct, it could render Einstein’s theory null, and make, at least theoretically, time travel possible.”
Everything had reached a standstill. Pia’s fingers drummed the wheel. She thought about bending time backwards, about slipping into her life-already-lived, watching as effect morphed into its cause. Sitting in gridlock, she travelled back over her fortieth birthday: how her car would re-spiral the car park’s exit; how the candle flames on her birthday cake would illuminate at lunchtime; how the coffee would be drunk before she had made it; how she would eat the omelette before watching the albumen and yolk slide back into the unsplit shell; how the laundry would dampen rather than dry; how they would make love, this morning, her and Daniel Cord; make their twin journeys from being clothed to being naked, from orgasm to the first hints of arousal (which she had tried, at first – though she didn’t know why – to push away); how, just before he began to touch her, for minutes, lone and awake, she would be looking at the bald white ceiling and marvelling at how deep her unhappiness went. I am middle-aged, she would think, as Daniel’s snores combed the air, and want not to be. Then she would be knifed awake by the thought that had woken her: Please, God! Let me have it all again!
The traffic was clearing as Pia turned left and started to speed along Ball’s Pond Road, escaping Dalston and entering the leafier groves of Canonbury. The scientist being interviewed had a gentle Swiss tilt to his flawless English. “What we are proposing is that the neutrinos might have travelled through a fourth – thus far unobserved – dimension of space. Imagine,” Pia pulled up sharply against the suddenly still traffic, “that this fourth dimension is flat, but quantum fluctuations have made it ripple, like the surface of the sea. Just as flying fish may take a shortcut against the current by skipping along the crests of the waves, this is what the neutrinos might be doing – freeing themselves of the dense matter below and flying quicker through another matter altogether: a fourth dimension.”
Pia thought the metaphor quite lovely: she imagined the neutrino flying with all the grace of the flying fish, breaking from the saltwater and soaring through the air, its silverflecked tail flashing in the light, its white belly hitting the next wave with a slap. Enlivened by the metaphor, and flying into the slipstream of the bus lane, Pia went faster than she should, surfing the crests of each car, freed from the traffic to her side. Without any warning a large truck, nose-heavy without its container, suddenly pulled out directly in front of her. Pia slammed the brakes and swerved. Her head and body sprang forward from the seat, travelling hard through time and space though the car had, metres from when she had first applied the brakes, come to a stop. The seatbelt burned a line across her chest. And then, just as suddenly, the course was snapped into reverse: her neck whipped backward, and her body began to close the space behind it. Odd, to be thinking of all those thousands of neutrinos that had coursed through her now streaming back through her organs and bones.
Her head hit the back of the seat and, in time, she became still. Her eyes closed. The world went black and quiet. She let go. Giving in, she ghosted back through memory. She drank the coffee, ate the omelette, took down the laundry still damp. Her mind skipped backwards faster still, with all the flight of the flying fish: the births of her kids, her marriage to Daniel, getting her doctorate, falling in love for the first time at university. Now that her future was her past, she knew exactly what was to come, and the thrill of anticipation only made the feelings all the more exquisite. To wake up; to be in this stilled car; to be racing towards a restaurant dinner she had no mind to think about; in short, to be in time, meant facing a future
Pia had no possession of. Or perhaps to wake up meant to find herself dead, her head bloodied on the steering-wheel, all time stopped. But then, like the flying fish wrenched out of water, she was pulled back down into the matter below.

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There was a man outside her window. He was speaking. He peered in, looking afraid. Sound came back to the world. “You OK?” She touched herself as if incapable of feeling things without the administration of her hands. Her hands, there they were; her stomach, her shoulders, her face. He said again, “You OK?”
“I think I have whiplash.”
“You want to call someone? AA? Ambulance?”
“No.”
“Sure?”
“Yes. I’m not far from home. I’ll be all right till then.” They politely squabbled about whether this was a good idea, then the man left and drove away. She took a deep breath and began again the drive home.
On her street the September leaves were golden, red, green. The sun caked them in light. Pia came to a stop outside their flat. She held her neck, massaging it; stepped out onto the warm tarmac. Keys and wallet and phone were gathered around the footwell, as if after a flood. Groaning, she bent down to gather them back into her bag. She stepped gingerly toward her house; conscious of herself.
The hall was cool, much cooler than the outside. “Daniel?”
“Hi,” he said, his voice arcing from another room.
There was a card on the side. “Happy 41st ”, it said. The card was from her mother.
“She’ll be forgetting your name next,” said Daniel, behind her.
The hot band of the seatbelt had begun to fade. She wanted to tell him something, what was it that she wanted to tell him? Just that she wanted to go forward; that she could no more ghost through the time she had left than the time she had passed through. Something about the accident lent itself to privacy; she would not tell him. Instead she kissed him. Though it was autumn his mouth was warm with summer sun.
Particles ghosted through these lips, both his and hers. Pia stayed there for longer than she had done this morning, before she had turned away from him, begun to dress, gone to make coffee, the omelette, hung the laundry on the line. “You okay?” he asked, just as the driver had.
“Yes,” she said.
“Come on, then,” he said. “Time waits for no man.” She went upstairs to change.
(2012)

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