Shear (Parks, Tim) by Tim Parks

Author:Tim Parks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

Day Five

Morning

He had his petrographic microscope and was doing a point count to establish the mode. With his specimen sliced down to 3ομ the light beneath came through in a grey glow, breaking into colour around stray accessories. His children took it in turns to look through the second eyepiece, and he was apologising profusely to them for the complexity and fragility of the matrix, its unpredictability. To make matters worse, there was a man’s face that kept surfacing among the crystals and whose nose followed the specimen’s main microfracture through a line of quartz grains to end abruptly against feldspar. But the children were reacting well, asking all the right questions – what was that orange bit, that thing that looked like glass? – though unfortunately they had to shout because of the din of the gangsaws from elsewhere in the building. Mark’s voice was especially shrill.

He moved the specimen slightly, hoping this would get rid of the face, but it simply shifted, re-formed, grinning foolishly now, a skull-like grin, the eyes two black biotites and below a chipped tooth of white quartz. Sarah giggled. Mark fought over the lens to have a look. So that he had lost his place in the point count. He would have to go back to the beginning. He tried to adjust the analyser to make the face disappear, while explaining that the whole earth was made up of such combinations of minerals, or others similar, or others similar again, and the variations were endless. See how the vitreous quartz grains clung together, and then the background mass of the feldspars with the one microcline phenocryst that gave that porphyritic texture. And you had to think, normally this pattern, if you could call it that, would all be in three dimensions, and every single relationship – this crystal attached to the one above more strongly than to the other below – every single relationship and chemical formula played its part in determining the strength of the whole, so that you could never quite compute such a thing, but only break each randomly sectioned piece to find out.

Then he realised Margaret was in the room, cross-legged and quite naked in an executive chair, watching, smiling; but no, it was Thea, it was Thea, and the smile on that too-perfectly-chiselled face was a smile of challenge. She must have left a door open coming in because the noise of the slabbing was louder than ever and he was having to shout himself hoarse, but he must keep the children interested, otherwise they would turn and see her and they must not see her. They must not know about his other life.

Mark was at the eyepiece now. So, he shouted, it was all rather a muddle, but wasn’t it beautiful too: those vivid patches of green, for example, traces of amphibole, each unique in shape and situation, not like man-made things, plastic and steel which were always the same right through. And still the face in the matrix wouldn’t go away.

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