The Ghost of Matter by Octavia Cade

Author:Octavia Cade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ernest rutherford, atom, nuclear, ghosts, new zealand, alternate history
Publisher: Paper Road Press
Published: 2015-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

CAMBRDIGE, 1930

IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN the most awful Christmas that Ernest had ever had. He couldn’t think of a worse. There was nothing of celebration in it, even with the new baby. ‘A Christmas baby,’ Eileen had said, not two months before, round and waddling with her fourth child while the other three played about her. ‘My little winter baby.’ She herself had been born into spring – or autumn, depending on the hemisphere, but she had been born in the north, so there were no kōwhai about her.

She had been born into spring, and had died in winter. Died giving birth to her winter baby, two days before Christmas and Ernest couldn’t believe it still, couldn’t understand the world in which his only child died in the season of gifts and gratitude.

He and Ralph had taken the children outside, while Mary stayed with the baby. The kids had looked so stunned, so uncomprehending and the way that they sat around the tree, listless, had forced Ernest up out of his chair.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Grab your jackets. Hats, scarves, mittens. Mush! You too, Ralph.’ His daughter’s husband, a physicist as well, a close companion at Cavendish even though he was a theoretician at heart, and even more stupefied than Ernest. ‘You can’t sit here all day.’ Watching the children pretend to play with their gifts, trying to answer questions that had no answer. ‘You’ll feel better with some fresh air, some exercise.’ And didn’t that just sound hollow. Ernest didn’t want fresh air and exercise himself. He wanted to go to his lab, to forget his grief in experiments, to break glass and rage and have a reason for the raging. Failing that, he wanted to go to bed. To try and dream, to try and forget.

Almost the very last thing he wanted was to tramp through a frozen garden on a bum leg. But someone needed to try to warm his grandchildren out of apathy, the ones that couldn’t be soothed with milk and rocking, and the house had become oppressive. Too many visitors, too much sympathy. Too much food, too, spread over every surface – brought by friends and colleagues and it was all Christmas food because that was all anyone had in their larders.

Ernest could quite happily have thrown all the mince pies into the Cam before he ate another. Fruit and citrus and pastry ... there was nothing about any of them that tasted of separation. He would have been happier if all that had been brought tasted like ashes in his mouth – at least that would have been fitting. It would have been suitably funereal. Instead, the tastes were so vivid – it was a cruelty, to eat and feel so alive. Even the children felt it. He’d put tangerines in their stockings, as he always did, but they hadn’t been eaten. He’d have to peel one when they got back, share it around, and smile at the kids so that they ate it.

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