We only ever see one side of the moon. The moon takes the same time to circle the earth as it does to turn on its own axis, which means that the same point on the moon always faces the earth. A strange coincidence, but then everything about the universe is miraculous.
The moon's rotation and orbit are so perfectly synchronised that from its surface, the earth is frozen in the sky. There is no earth-rise or earth-set, just the earth rotating in the sky, a great rolling ball that never reaches its destination.
This was one of the first things Alice told me. She was always coming out with facts like that. She had an amazing power to make me see familiar things in a new way. After she'd told me one of her facts, she would flick her head to the side to get her long hair out of her eyes, then tuck it behind her left ear; as if the movement were the full stop at the end of her story.
Alice was half my age, but twice as intelligent. She knew what was going on in the world. She could explain the Israel/Palestine conflict in neat little sentences. She knew the names of everything, of trees, of birds, of cars. She was modest. She always credited her knowledge as coming from someone else, as if she had just happened across it accidentally.
"Oh, my dad spent three years rebuilding a Volkswagen Beetle from scratch, so I got to learn a bit about engines," she would say; or, "My uncle's a real nature nut and he told me how to tell all the seabirds apart when we were on holiday in Scotland."
She met informed people all the time and absorbed whatever knowledge they had to impart. I have no such ability. I could spend a week with someone smart and not learn a single thing from them. I've managed to live my first thirty-four years without accumulating any kind of knowledge.
I first spoke to Alice a couple of years ago at a climate change rally in Trafalgar Square. She was standing on the fountain wall, just above me, wearing a T-shirt that said "Jesus is coming, look busy." She'd looked down at me a couple of times during KT Tunstall's set, and I smiled back. And when the rally finished, she jumped down next to me and said, "That was a bloody waste of time."
"Sorry?" I said, grabbing her arm to help her up.
"Couldn't you feel it? There was all this anticipation in the air, but when they said goodbye, you could actually feel the inertia setting back in."
"Maybe they're not," I said. "Maybe they're going home to write to their MPs."
"I don't think so," she said.
"And how do you know that?"
"I just know these things. I've got intuition. Like I saw you watching me, and I knew you were going to be important in my life somehow."
I couldn't help but be excited to hear her say that.
"Really?" I said.
Her friends tried to get her to leave with them, but she said she'd call on her mobile later to catch up.
"I'm starving," she said. "Buy me something and we can chat, and maybe I'll work out why we met."
I offered to take her to a sushi bar in Covent Garden, but she wanted to eat at McDonald's. She didn't look like the kind of person that eats regularly at McDonald's, but the way she reeled out her order without looking at the menu suggested that she did.
"Isn't this place one of the worst consumerist, anti-environmental places you could eat?" I asked.
"Probably, yes. But I don't care," she said, her mouth full of Big Mac. She wiped a blob of something from the corner of her mouth.
"So doesn't that make you as bad as everyone you said was going out shopping after the rally?"
"Yes," she said. "I'm just as bad as everyone else. I don't believe in climate change, but I want to."
"You don't believe in it?"
"No," she said, chewing. "I was hoping the rally would change my mind. And it almost did for a second. But I just can't bring myself to care."
"That's scary."
"In the grand scheme of things it doesn't really matter. In the history of the universe, humans have only been around for a fraction of a fraction of a nothing. Species come, species go. Planets bloom and die. If you watched the universe on fast forward, the planets would be coming and going so fast they'd look like the bubbles fizzing at the top of your Coke."
"But doesn't that make the planet even more precious, that it's here for such a short time?"
I folded my arms across the table, breathing in the smell of Alice's sticky sweet perfume. She had thick make-up around her eyes, inexpertly applied.
She sipped her Coke. "I'd like to believe that. But I can't. We're only getting so worked up about climate change because we want to feel like we count. Environmentalism is our way of asserting our dominance over the planet again. If we have the power to create and destroy the world, we're its masters. It's just another ego trip for the human race."
"Wow, how did you get to be so cynical?"
"Not cynical. I just see the big picture."
While Alice ate, she asked me questions. She seemed determined that she had met me for a reason. That I had something important to impart, or influence to have on her. She wanted to know all about me so she could work out what it was.
"You ask a lot of questions," I said.
"That's how I find out stuff."
When Alice had finished her food, she said she had to go and meet her friends, and I felt a hiccup of emptiness at the thought of never seeing her again. But I was relieved when she took out a pen from her handbag and wrote her mobile number on a napkin.
"I'm afraid we'll have to meet again," she said. "I'm still not sure why we met. Give me a call."
I sent a text message to Alice that night. "Want to meet up and ask some more questions?"
I only had to wait two minutes for her reply, but it seemed like longer. Her message read, "Yes meet outside golders green station next sat at 4."
Alice was all I could think about that week. Things at home weren't going so well, and my new friend was the only source of pleasure in my mind.
Beth, my wife, and I were arguing a lot. Our baby, Isobel, was six months old and had terrible colic. She was screaming all the time and we couldn't stand it. Neither of us was getting any sleep, and I was wondering why we'd decided to have a baby in the first place. When Saturday came around, I was panicking about how to get out of the house for a few hours without raising suspicion. Isobel had woken up seven times during the night, and Beth and I had a violent argument over a teabag I'd left on the draining board. It escalated until we were screaming the most poisonous things we could think of, and then with a final, "You've ruined my life," I left the house and slammed the door behind me.
I arrived at Golders Green station half an hour early, so I got a gingerbread latté from Starbucks. It was one of their Christmas specials. Drinking that hot, sweet coffee outside the station in the cold, watching bus lights flare in the gloom, was a delicious moment. I wondered whether Alice would come. And when she hadn't arrived at 4.20, I began to worry. I couldn't go home straight after that argument. It would take Beth a while to calm down. I sent a text message to Alice, "are you coming?" and then a few seconds later, my phone rang.
"Can you see me?" she said.
I looked around. There were people moving everywhere. And then I saw her on the other side of the road waving at me. She was wearing a pink ski jacket. I know if Beth could see me like this, she would assume that something terrible was going on, but when Alice was in front of me, I felt like there was some magic left in the universe, and I wouldn't let go of my tiny sliver of it for anything.
"Where shall we go?" she said.
"Straight in with the questions," I said. "Do you want to go into town?"
"Can we get one of those first?" She pointed at the cup in my hand. "It smells lovely."
Alice grabbed a table while I queued for coffees. I wondered then whether anyone I knew might see us. I would have trouble explaining what I was doing. No one would believe me. While I waited for the staff to froth up our coffees, I thought of excuses I would give if anyone asked.
At the table, Alice took a sip of her gingerbread latté, and closed her eyes. "Wow, that's good," she said.
"I won't be able to sleep tonight after two cups."
Around us, people rattled spoons and warmed their noses in steaming cups.
"Are you married?" Alice asked.
"Yes," I said. "I have a baby too."
"What's your baby's name?"
"Isobel. She's six months old. She has colic at the moment, so she screams all the time."
"Poor thing."
This will sound awful, but until Alice said that, I'd only thought of Isobel's colic as something that affected Beth and me. The broken sleep, the screaming, the vomiting. It was dominating my life. I couldn't believe I'd not considered that Isobel was doing this because she was in pain. I had no natural empathy with her. All I could see was how it was affecting me. I was so ashamed I couldn't look up for a second.
"I bet your wife is gorgeous," Alice said, smiling to herself and flicking her hair back.
"She used to have long hair like yours, but she cut it all off a couple of months ago. It's a practical haircut. Short hair doesn't get full of baby sick."
"Gross. I don't think I'm ever going to have kids."
"How come?"
"I just can't see myself with a kid. It's not an image I can make in my head."
"One of your intuitions?"
"I guess. I can see myself standing on a boat out at sea doing research on octopuses, or in a jungle in Borneo taking samples of bat droppings, but not pushing a pram around."
"It's difficult to imagine what you're going to do when you're older," I said. "And you never end up where you thought you were going to be. Sometimes, it's like discovering you're wearing someone else's clothes, but they fit you perfectly."
"So you're not happy with how your life ended up?"
"It's not over yet, " I smiled. "I'm only thirty-two. I'm still considered young by everyone thirty-three and over."
"I guess you are young, relative to most people on the planet," she said. "But if you were the last person on the earth, would you still be young?"
"I think my self-image would be the last thing I'd think about in that situation."
We finished our coffees and walked outside. I asked where she wanted to go next. She said surprise me. She had to be home by nine, so we still had a few hours. I took her on a bus ride into town, the 13, which goes down Baker Street and then Oxford Street. I wanted to show her the Christmas lights.
We got out at Oxford Circus and walked down the length of Regent Street. The shop windows were full of sparkling beads, and great gleaming baubles hung above the street. Shoppers jostled against each other, clashing bags. Sometimes I put my arm around Alice to protect her from the crowds. Wherever there was an impressive window display, we would stop in front of it and point things out to each other.
We walked all the way down to Trafalgar Square. Sometimes I would look at Alice and smile to make sure she was okay, and sometimes she would take a tissue from her pocket to blow her nose.
"This is the first time I've worn this coat this winter," she said. "It's weird when you put on an old coat and you find things in your pockets. They're like little time capsules."
"So what did you find in your pocket?"
She took out each of the items. "A throat sweet from when I had a cold last year. A cinema ticket with a boy's phone number on it. He was a real dick. Some beads from my favourite necklace that broke. The leftovers of a dried flower from my sister's wedding."
"You have a sister?" I said.
"Clare. She's five years older than me. She got married last November. There were gale-force winds. It was so funny. In the photos, everyone's holding their hats on, their dresses and hair all flapping about."
We stood at the bus stop and listened to a Japanese busker playing Beatles songs on an acoustic guitar.
"So what have you got in your pocket?" she asked.
"Nothing exciting. A bus ticket, my phone, one of Isobel's socks, and a stone from the beach."
"Which beach?"
"A place in Dorset. I can't remember the name of it. We were there a couple of months ago."
"Why did you keep that particular stone?"
"Do you think my choice of stone reveals something about my personality?"
"Maybe," she smiled. "I'm not an expert, but there has to be a reason you chose that stone to take home, over all the others on the beach."
"This one just stood out, I suppose."
She frowned, dissatisfied.
When we got back in the bus, we were warm, sitting close together. Our hot breath steamed up the window, and Alice frequently wiped it away with the sleeve of her jacket. We were back on Oxford Street.
"Did your parents ever bring you here to see the Christmas lights?" I asked.
"Once," she said. "Well, my mum and stepdad."
"Your parents are divorced?"
"Since I was four."
"Why did they break up?"
"I don't know. I think they just hated each other."
"Do you think it was for the best?"
"I guess so. If they'd stayed together, they might have killed each other. And my stepdad wouldn't have been my stepdad, and it's weird to think of him living somewhere else and not knowing him."
"So you think it was fate that they split up?"
"I thought I was supposed to ask the questions."
"Sorry," I said.
Alice asked me all about my work. She'd never met anyone that worked in the film industry before. I could see her clever interview style working round, building up a mental image of my day, and then tracing back to fill in gaps where she hadn't understood something. And then just as we got to Swiss Cottage she nodded to herself, as if she'd reached saturation point for that subject. She stared out of the window, resting the side of her forehead on the glass. Little strands of her hair stuck to the condensation.
I couldn't get over how pretty she was. Her mouth was perfectly formed, maybe from her sixteen years of question-asking, toned from constant exercise.
"Would you like to meet up again?" I asked when we were back outside the station.
"Sure," she said. "You're not letting your secret out easily. It's going to take me a bit longer to get it out of you."
I smiled and thrust my hands into my pockets, shrugging my shoulders up around my neck for warmth. I hadn't decided then whether I would tell her my secret. I couldn't bear to frighten her off. "Shall I send you a text message?" I said.
"Okay." And then she blew me a kiss and ran away.
"Hey," I called after her. "I should walk you back."
"Don't worry. I've got pepper spray."
It was almost nine. I called Beth and told her I was sorry about losing my temper. I felt awful, I said. I picked her up her favourite Iraqi-style falafel and a pack of dark chocolate and went home.
I saw Alice three more times over the Christmas season. Each time, the level of her questions dropped, as if her inquisitive mechanism were growing weary.
"My instincts have never been wrong before," she said one night as we sat on the sofa in her parents' house. They'd gone away for the weekend. Alice rested her head on my chest and I put my arm around her. "I have to assume that you're holding something back from me. And that isn't fair."
"Everyone keeps something back," I said. "Do you think anyone on the planet fully reveals themselves to other people? I think we just show one side of ourselves, and we keep the other side hidden from view, like the moon."
"But that's probably what's wrong with the world," she said. "If everyone just pretends to be what they think other people will like, then we'll never really feel accepted or understood."
"I think our pretences are the things that hold society together. The thing that makes us human is the way we restrain ourselves so that others will accept us. If we all acted the way we felt like, there'd be chaos. There'd be sex and fighting in the streets. We're like molecules holding hands to form a solid. A block of ice, say. If we all ran around living out our instincts, free of restraint, the structure would collapse. We'd be water."
"But water can go places a block of ice never could."
"Okay, maybe that's a bad analogy," I said.
"It's not," Alice said. "I think if we really were free, there would be some of the chaos that you talk about, but we wouldn't all be like that. I'm never tempted to kill someone on the street or just rip off my clothes and screw someone I fancy on the tube. And in the end, it doesn't really matter what we do. Like you say, we're all just molecules. It's not the individual parts that are important, but the shape of the whole."
"This is your, 'the human race is only around for the blink of a cosmic eye' thing again."
"I still haven't made my mind up about that," Alice said. "I say that, but then I enjoy being alive, and I want to learn things and to experience things, but I don't really know what it's all for."
"Well, that's the big question isn't it. And I definitely don't have an answer for that one."
"You disappoint me."
"You know," I said. "I can't tell if you're really smart, or really naive."
Alice laughed and tucked her hair behind her ear. "I can't tell if that's a compliment or an insult."
While Alice made tea for us, I looked at the family photos pinned to the walls. There were only pictures of Alice, her sister and her parents; no friends or other relatives, as if they were a genealogical island floating in a sea without time. This gave further evidence towards my theory about her, but I still couldn't entirely grasp it. Maybe I would never fully understand why I had been compelled to follow Alice. I kept asking her questions, as she did to me, and sometimes she'd say something that would make me put together another link, but still it was a mystery. I was now convinced that the universe was playing some kind of game with me, and I just hoped that I would solve it before it tore my family to pieces.
I'd been seeing Alice as often as I could for three months when Beth found the birthday card from her. Beth seldom had reason to go into my work bag, but one day she was looking for the nail scissors and had exhausted every other hiding place in the house.
"What's this?" she said.
"Oh that," I said, and knew instantly that my pause held in it all the gravity of what I'd been doing. "It's a card from someone at work."
Beth ran her fingers along the side of her head—a habit left over from when she had long hair. Her face was red and blotchy, with some barely controlled emotion, and just looking at her made my face feel the same way. We continued an implied conversation, one that had no words, just a heavy silence, like a hot fog filling the room. And then Beth tossed the card on to the table and stormed upstairs.
I gave her a few minutes, thinking about what I would say, and decided that the only way I was going to make things okay would be to tell her the truth, no matter how bizarre it sounded.
I found her upstairs folding sheets on the bed. She was snapping the fabric into neat folds and slamming them down in a pile. She did not look up at me.
"It's not what you think," I said. "I know that sounds stupid, and that's what people always say when they're having an affair, but I promise you I'm not. Alice is only sixteen. She's…"
Beth looked up at me with such horror that I began to doubt myself.
"Sixteen?" she said.
"She's a friend, that's all. I promise."
Beth pushed past me and went back downstairs.
"Please give me a chance to explain," I said, following her.
"Shut up," she snapped from the stairs. "You'll wake up Isobel."
She dropped herself on to the sofa downstairs and I squatted in front of her. A vulnerable position. She could easily have kicked me in the face from there, and she looked like she wanted to.
"Okay, listen," I began. "A few months ago I was sitting on the bus when I saw this girl a few seats in front, and I could just tell instantly that there was something strange about her."
Beth's eyes were bulging in her head. I had to get to the point quickly, or she really might have done something terrible to me.
"It's hard to explain, but I knew she was Isobel."
Beth's angry eyebrows twitched with confusion.
"Our Isobel," I said. "Our baby, but grown up."
"What?" She screwed up her face.
"I can barely make sense of it myself."
Beth started to stand up but I put my hands on her legs to stop her. She smacked my hands away and then sat down and folded her arms. "Go on then," she said. "Explain to me why you're sleeping with a child."
"I promise you, it's nothing like that," I said. I sat on the opposite end of the sofa to her. "I saw this girl on the bus, and I just knew it was her. Our Isobel. But she was grown up. I don't know what it was about her, but it was a parental instinct. It's the only parental instinct I've had."
Beth snorted at this. "Tell me about it," she said.
"She just seemed to glow. Imagine if you met yourself out on the street. That was what it felt like. I don't know how the universe works, and how it's possible, but it was her. When she got off the bus, I knew I couldn't lose her, so I followed her home."
Beth rolled her eyes again and refolded her arms.
"I came home then, but I couldn't stop thinking about her. I've had a pretty ordinary life really, but now something bizarre was happening, something supernatural. I just couldn't let it go. So I went back to her house a few days later, and I sat in the car for hours until I saw her come out with her parents."
"And did her parents look exactly like us?" She raised her eyebrows.
"No, they…"
"You're really scaring me," she said. "I think you should go now."
"Please just let me finish. Her parents weren't us, but their daughter was our daughter, only grown up. I can't explain what it was about her. I just felt it so deeply. So I followed her parents' car until they dropped her off at a friend's, and then I followed her and her friend into town. I know it sounds weird, but there was a reason I had seen her, and I had to find out what it was. I followed her a few more times until she noticed me for the first time in Trafalgar Square. When we started talking, I knew there was something special about her. I knew I hadn't been wrong. She's so smart. She knows twice as much as me, but she's half my age."
Beth huffed air out of her nose.
"It's not an affair," I said. "It's our daughter. Can't you see how exciting it was to see her grown up? She's going to be amazing. She's this incredible kid. The thoughts she has in her head, they just sparkle."
"I wish you could hear yourself. You sound absolutely nuts. Do you know what, I think maybe you're not having an affair. Maybe you have just lost it. I'm going to stay with my parents for a few weeks. You can go crazy here by yourself. I don't want you near our daughter, either of them. I can't trust you."
So Beth left, but I had to see Alice again, just one last time.
I sent her a text message and asked her to meet me outside the station, and then I took her to the Natural History Museum. It was my favourite place as a kid, and I'd always thought that if ever I had kids, I would take them there as often as possible.
"Did you know," she said, as we walked through the stuffed birds exhibit, "that young cuckoos find their way to Africa in the winter without any help from their real parents? They hatch in another bird's nest, but somehow they still know that they're cuckoos and they know where to go."
"I did know that," I said. "There are still more mysteries in the world than explanations. And wouldn't it be awful to live in a world where everything had a reason?"
"I guess so, but then why do we work so hard to explain everything?"
"Maybe the human race is just hard-wired to shoot itself in the foot, to do something even though we know it will bring us misery eventually."
"I thought I was supposed to be the pessimist," she said.
I held her hand and smiled. "Can I show you the blue whale?" I asked.
"I've seen it before."
"Can I show it to you anyway?"
"Sure."
We stood in front of the blue whale and looked up at the massive creature, flanked by two skeletal companions. It looked more real when I was a kid.
"What would it be like to swim with a blue whale?" Alice asked.
"I think I'd be terrified," I said.
"But they don't eat people."
"I'd still be terrified. Something that big, moving. I'd be like a caveman seeing a dinosaur for the first time."
"Cavemen and dinosaurs weren't around at the same time."
"I knew that. Bad analogy."
"It looks so lonely," Alice said.
We walked along the length of the blue whale.
"Listen," I said, stopping, and putting my hand on Alice's shoulder. "I've got to tell you something." Alice looked up at me, and she was so lovely. I felt awful. "This is crazy, but my wife thinks I'm having an affair with you."
Alice's cheeks flushed red, and she looked like she was about to say something and stopped.
"She's really gone nuts about it," I said. "And I can't explain to her the relationship we have. I… this is the last thing I want to do, believe me, I would love to spend every day with you like this. You're all I think about. But I don't think it's such a good…we can't get together like this any more."
When I stopped, the only sound in the gallery was the slow heartbeat of the blue whale. The walls reverberated with it. While I watched red estuaries fill up the space beneath Alice's cheeks, my vision wavered, as if the room were full of water. Tiny organisms darted between us.
We stood like that for four of the blue whale's ponderous heartbeats, and then saltwater began to leak out of her eyes and she ran away from me. I called after her, and followed her, but lost her in the maze of corridors. I ran right out to the main entrance and looked down the path from the museum, but she wasn't there. She couldn't have got away so quickly. I walked the galleries for the next few hours, imagining her crying, crouched in a primate exhibit, their cold glass eyes consoling her. But I didn't find her.
When I left, I felt like I'd been stuffed and my bones replaced with mechanical armatures. The thought of going back to a life without Alice was unbearable.
On the tube on the way home, I thought about baby Isobel. If I didn't screw things up with Beth, I would get to see Isobel grow up into Alice, and it wouldn't be long before I'd be able to take her to the Natural History Museum, or into town to see the Christmas lights.
I got a text message from Alice a week later, just when I was getting used to the idea of life without her. She said, "Now I know why I met you." That was all. And I could only imagine what awful lesson about the betrayal of trust or friendship she had learned from me.
I never saw Alice again. I resisted the urge to go to her house. To do so would just restart the whole process of my marriage dissolving. But I did look out for her wherever I went, hoping to catch a fragment of her smile across a crowd, or to see her push her hair behind her ear one more time, and imagine that somehow I was important to her.
