Entanglement

Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Katy Mahood asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Excerpt from ‘Love After Love’ by Derek Walcott reprinted from Collected Poems, 1948-1984 (1986) by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and Farrar, Strauss & Giroux

Excerpts from ‘Sea Fever’ by John Masefield reprinted by permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of John Masefield

Excerpt from ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’ by William Wordsworth

Copyright © Katy Mahood 2018

Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Cover photograph © ITAR-TASS/TopFoto

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008245658

Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780008245672

Version: 2018-09-25

Praise for Entanglement

‘Dexterously structured . . . [a] wise debut’

Observer

‘A beautifully deceptive novel that gently entraps the reader with the lightest-touch characters and a slowly gripping story, studded with glittering moments. It is about how we arrive at who we are now, thinking we were heading along one route and only finding our true paths in retrospect. A hugely impressive debut’

STELLA DUFFY

‘Beautifully written and sensitively observed’

HANNAH BECKERMAN

‘A really accomplished debut novel about how life is a series of connections, coincidences and chance’

Red Magazine

Dedication

For my parents, Tess and Jim

Epigraph

When two systems enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before … I would call that the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. Because of their interaction these two quantum states have become entangled.

‘The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics’ by Erwin Schrödinger, 1935

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Prelude

1. Collision

Chapter 1.1

Chapter 1.2

Chapter 1.3

Chapter 1.4

Chapter 1.5

2. Duality

Chapter 2.1

Chapter 2.2

Chapter 2.3

3. Superposition

Chapter 3.1

Chapter 3.2

Chapter 3.3

Chapter 3.4

Chapter 3.5

Chapter 3.6

Chapter 3.7

4. Non-Locality

Chapter 4.1

Chapter 4.2

Chapter 4.3

Chapter 4.4

Chapter 4.5

Chapter 4.6

Chapter 4.7

Chapter 4.8

Chapter 4.9

Chapter 4.10

Chapter 4.11

Chapter 4.12

Chapter 4.13

Interlude

5. Decoherence

Chapter 5.1

Chapter 5.2

Chapter 5.3

Chapter 5.4

Chapter 5.5

Chapter 5.6

Chapter 5.7

Chapter 5.8

Reprise

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

PRELUDE

4 August 1977

At first she thinks it is a cloud, or smoke. But its undulations are too regular, too melodic. As the train closes the distance, the movements become more granular, a lace-like pattern of dark and sky, curving rhythmically in waves and turns above the countryside, and Stella sees it is a group of fast-flying birds. Wingtips almost touching, they move in perfect motion, against the evening sky.

Murmuration. There is magic to it, this seamless dance of small birds weaving a form that exists only in their togetherness. The tree on the horizon, the church, the hill: these things stand still as time moves around them. But this is something more; a new dimension forged in time and motion.

The train arrives. From above, the arches of the roof of Paddington Station curve and roll, ripple marks made by the tide of progress. The concourse teems with life, eddying across the mica-flecked floor. A fresh flood flows from a newly halted train and somewhere within the throng is Stella, returned early from her summer break. She struggles with a heavy bag, nervous for the tiny life pulsing within her, a secret that at this moment is hers alone. In the summer heat the station air is hazy. Specks of smut rise and glisten, and she looks for the face of the man who will meet her, but for now sees only the fuzz of people and particles pushed by the waves of warm air and urgency.

And then, there he is. He moves stop-start through the throb of the crowd, long limbs that don’t quite know where to be, long hair falling in his face. John is thinking, she can see, not at that moment of her, but a thought scored through with formulae that could unlock this tangle of bodies, noise and motion. He lifts his head, eyes narrow in the glare of the dipping sun, and sees her silhouette with its halo of gold-lit hair, her shoulders stooped beneath the heavy bag. And though he knows the physical impossibility of it, time for him is suddenly slowed, revealing gaps he’d not discerned before, through which he moves to claim this fresh-skinned girl. They press together and the world around them speeds up once more, gusting fumes and breath and microscopic fragments of life, up, up and into the spiralling dance overhead.

4 August 2007

From below, the arches of Paddington Station reach towards the night sky. Stella sits, silent in her wedding clothes, sipping tea from a paper cup, waiting for the call to the sleeper train. Beside her, John leans back on his chair, his arm resting on their luggage. On the other side of the station, on a bench near a darkened shop front, Stella notices a man in a hat. He looks up and their gaze meets across the concourse. When he nods, Stella smiles in return.

John looks up at the arches of the roof. He knows that they are moving through time and space, spinning on a planet that is orbiting a star – and yet the late-night station seems quite still. A moment later, a clutch of pigeons bursts upwards; his knee knocks the table; hot tea spills. Stella leaps to her feet, skidding in her high heels as John reaches out to catch her a fraction too late. She lands with a gasp on the floor and looks down at her expensive cream skirt, where a murky stain blooms along the thigh. Her ankle hurts. She swallows hard and looks up. For a fraction of a second she sees his face as it once was: wide-eyed and taut with longing. A fine trail shimmers in the light above them and she turns towards the roof, searching for a tiny piece of the young woman who stepped from a train and the young man who was once there to meet her – but all she can see now is dust.

Scalar time passes. The hands on the large clock move. The man in the hat stands and leaves. On Platform 1, Stella takes John’s hand as they climb aboard the train and her eyes travel once more around the station, seeking out fragments of her past. She sees herself at twenty-one at the beginning of an academic career. Her violin case balanced on top of a suitcase weighted with books, a knot tightening from her stomach to her throat, her mother and father trotting to keep up as she pushes the trolley through the thronging travellers. They had bundled into a taxi, a sudden rainstorm blurring the windows of the cab as they’d watched commuters and tourists rush for cover beneath the dripping black awnings of Praed Street.

When, later that day, she’d arrived in the pub just off Gower Street with a straggling group of postgraduates, she’d noticed an angular man with sandy-coloured hair and hands that moved with quick precision as he talked. Bell-bottomed brown cords and a murky green T-shirt. Scientist, she’d thought, and turned to go. But her bag had clipped a glass and knocked a pint of bitter into his lap and, to her shame, Stella’s eyes had filled with unwanted tears. And then he’d smiled. It was a generous, lopsided smile that made it easy to laugh an apology and offer to buy him a drink. His hand had brushed her arm as they spoke and at his touch she’d felt something pass over her like light. With John the world had felt infused with colour and, as they walked together through the broad white streets of Bloomsbury, she’d had the sense that London was bursting to life beneath her feet.

More than thirty years on, the station feels the same, despite the screens and signs that jostle for attention. It is, she thinks, as it has always been, a threshold place of beginnings and farewells. Stella looks again at John, who raises her hand to his lips. She finds her thoughts are flying back and forth across the years; moments forgotten for decades rising to the surface, casting ripples that gather and collide, so that everything around her seems coated in a mismatched layer of the past. She can almost smell it as it teeters on the edges of her memory, that nameless musk of youth and sex and hope.

Outside the station, night buses rumble. A rowdy group of students stumbles past St Mary’s Hospital. The late-night shops have drawn down their shutters as the man walks past, his hat now in his hand. He sits for a moment on a low wall and wonders, not for the first time, what might have happened that day had he not descended the cellar steps. There’s no use in thinking like that, Charlie, he says aloud, and after a minute he stands up again and continues to walk.

The students are gone now and Charlie moves quietly in the dark streets, down Sussex Gardens and towards the park. Far away over Oxford Street the city-glow lightens the sky, but the dawn is still a good way off. In the inky still of Hyde Park, the dew has begun to fall. It clings to his heavy shoes and to the cuffs of his suit trousers, which grow thick and cold with the damp. He walks on to the middle of the park, where there is only a suggestion of the city beyond. Here, at the centre, there is almost solitude and except for the orange nub of the tall hotel to the east all is dark. Tired suddenly, he lies in the damp grass and the memories begin, as he knew that they would. But this time they start earlier, in the daylight, in a spot not far from here. He sees it as he saw it then: a young girl running in a thin red dress, the flash of her thigh as the fabric billows in the wind, her hand upon the curve of her belly, a tall man running back towards her. A name. Stella. As he closes his eyes, he feels a brief and unexpected peace pass through him and into the earth below.

And then, as they always do, the scenes behind his eyes grow dark. He feels the familiar lurch within and holds tight to his legs to make himself tiny and hard, but the images run through his mind as if on a loop: a smoke-filled silence, the blue-black glitter of lights on shattered glass, a white hand in the dark. In the chill night he hears his ragged breath and the creak of his clothes as he rocks back and forth in the grass. He knows this will pass. He remembers how it goes. And yet, it always feels as if this might be the big one, the point of no return. The thought is like a shriek, an involuntary gasp, rushing out of him unchecked.

Is this how it feels to be dying?

A dark chasm of fear looms before him, blank as a dialling tone, and he screws his eyes shut and hums to draw himself back from its infinite, terrifying space.

1.

COLLISION

8 October 1977

To become entangled the two particles must first interact.

McKearnan, L. Quantum Entanglement.

Paradox Publishing, 1982 (p. 2)

1.1

Charlie listened to the angry burr of the dialling tone before slamming the phone back into its cradle. Pushing the hair from his eyes he stood up, took a tie from the wardrobe and lifted a brown corduroy jacket from the back of the door. He shrugged it on, checking the elbows for holes. A yellow crust of egg clung to his cuff and he scrubbed at it with his fingernails, but the stubborn glaze stayed fast to the fabric, so he lit a cigarette instead.

The problem with the same old story is that you’ve heard it once too many times: a drama that leads always to the bottom of a bottle of vodka. When the phone had rung just after seven, he’d known it would be her. No one else would have rung reverse-charges in such a slurring stupor of obscenities and tears on his sister’s wedding day. It wasn’t as if you could blame Annie for not inviting the woman. She had been almost unintelligible with rage and drink, and when he tried to calm her she’d turned her venom to him: more swearing, more incoherent keening, something about being just like his father. She’d hung up before he’d had the chance to cut her off, his finger still hovering above the phone’s switchhook as he listened to the echo of the open line against his ear.

In the living room, dust floated in the shards of morning light. Outside, a milk float was whirring its tin-pot way along the street, empties clinking, and some time soon, he guessed, the post would arrive. Since Beth had been in France, his weeks were shaped by the post: a day could be transformed by the sight of a handwritten envelope, a foreign stamp. Beth’s letters sustained him in a way that a phone call could not, as if the ink held part of her, the deft strokes on the page inseparable from the slim fingers that had made them. Even the envelope could tug his desire as he imagined her tongue passing over its gummed edge.

He heard the creak of a floorboard and the rattle of a pipe from above. Other people were stirring around him, their days easing into the simplicity of this October Saturday. They had not been woken by the phone and the shrieks of his mother. They were lucky.

For a moment he allowed himself to picture what Beth would be doing now, in her flat above the sand-coloured streets of Montpellier. He imagined her asleep, soft tanned limbs curled about one another, dark hair falling across the curve of her cheek as her lips shaped semi-silent words. He closed his eyes, trying to hold onto the image, and a hollow bloomed between his heart and his stomach, a space so tender with longing that he imagined it had actually been carved from his flesh.

The first time Charlie had seen Beth she was sitting by the canal in Camden swinging her legs against the warm stone. She had been luxuriant beneath the early evening sunlight, her taut skin glossy as a ripe plum. As she’d swept her dark hair from her face, he’d noticed her eyes, green with a golden aura around each pupil, a pair of sunflowers floating on the sea. A Jewish princess she’d called herself, laughing over her beer in a pub garden on Haverstock Hill and telling him of a childhood in Hampstead, school days at Haberdashers’ and high days and holidays with an extended family that ran into hundreds. ‘Though we were not,’ she’d said, ‘all together at once.’ Exotic words and festivals with their own exotic foodstuffs. Honey cake, rich and cloying. The crass heat of horseradish offset by watery-sweet sugared apple. Her body, too, he came to discover was a rare indulgence; the firm heaviness of her breasts, the silken curve of her back, the salty tang of her soft thighs.

On that first evening he had walked her home.

‘How gallant of you,’ she’d deadpanned as they’d stood in the doorway of her flat, her face half hidden by shadow, a faint gleam of sweat on her forehead. She had turned her eyes up towards him and pulled his hands around her waist. Charlie had longed to say something that wouldn’t make him feel like he was speaking from a script shaped by bad films and second-rate novels. But how could he explain the hunger wrestling with fear, the unscratchable itch of his desire? The words that he reached for felt empty and sordid, a cheap imitation of the purity of his feelings. In those eyes and that body he saw his world transformed by a force as elemental as fire. When she’d pressed her mouth to his he’d breathed coconut oil and cigarette smoke and felt his hands shake as they ran the length of her back. She had smiled, her face patrician in the dim light as she’d opened the door and led him to her bedroom where, for a time, Charlie hadn’t thought in words at all.

There was a crash from the kitchen and Charlie pulled his hand from his trousers where he’d been rearranging himself. A lean man with a cloud of brown hair appeared in the doorway, naked beneath an open dressing gown.

‘Sorry, man, I smashed a mug.’

‘Limpet! What are you …? Shit! Do your fucking dressing gown up, man!’

Limpet tied his belt, put a cigarette between his lips and stood, thin arm outstretched until Charlie slapped a lighter onto his palm.

‘Thanks, Chaz.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

Like Charlie, Limpet had graduated from Edinburgh University three years ago. But unlike Charlie, who was slogging away in the menial backrooms of a literary agency, Limpet slept late, worked evenings in the pub down the road, and played his guitar for most of the time in between.

They sat together, smoking. After a while, Limpet rubbed his eyes and looked at Charlie.

‘What’s with the suit?’

Charlie scratched at the egg stain. ‘It’s Annie’s wedding today. You’re coming, right?’

Limpet drew hard on his cigarette. ‘You want a lift?’ he asked without looking up.

When Limpet had turned up with his mother’s Hillman Imp last month, Charlie had wondered how the old car had made it down the M1. It was so rusty around the door frames and the fender, he was surprised that nothing had fallen off. But the car seemed to be indestructible and Limpet, to Charlie’s surprise, turned out to be a keen mechanic, tinkering away with the engine when he wasn’t playing his guitar. Still, Charlie was certain that the car was an accident just waiting to happen.

‘Hm, thanks mate, but I’m going to take the Tube.’

Charlie liked the Tube. He liked to imagine that all of London flowed through its tunnels: past, present and future. He loved the descent into its warmth and the way he could emerge a short time later in another part of the city. It had taken him years to match the spread of the city above ground to Harry Beck’s inspired but misleading Tube map and, like any seasoned Londoner he loved his insider’s knowledge of the short cuts and the simplest changes. He adored the smell and the pace of that world underground, the warm blast of air when the train was about to arrive and the giddy rush of the carriages as they drew in just inches from your face. Down below the surface, Charlie found clues of the city’s past everywhere: at Marylebone, where the old station name ‘Great Central’ was tiled along the platform wall; at Charing Cross, where torn layers of posters dated back a quarter century to the Festival of Britain. In the constant motion of the Tube trains and commuters Charlie saw a cascade of lives and times: the tight-lipped Edwardian lady, the bowler-hatted Metrolander, the demobbed Tommy, the East End families sheltering on the platforms, the Mods and Rockers picking fights with each other, the punks picking fights with everyone. The Tube, he thought, was the keeper of the city’s secret history, written in the footfalls of the people who’d passed through it.

The jangle of the phone made them jump. Shaking his head, Limpet lifted it from its cradle. His eyes widening as he passed it to Charlie.

‘Hello?’

There was a hiss and muffled breathing. Then his sister’s voice. ‘Charlie?’

‘Annie – you OK? – what’s up?’

‘I – it’s – I’m—’

Charlie could picture her holding her hand over the receiver, trying to compose herself.

‘Annie, it’s OK.’

‘I’m frightened, Charlie.’

She was scared that their mother would turn up uninvited to the wedding.

‘She might get it into her head to get on the Tube and it’s only an hour from home –’

(How can she call it home? thought Charlie. It’s never been a home to us.) ‘– and then she might just show up and Ben will be furious. He’s already stormed off God knows where and we’ve only got a few hours and …’

Her voice was growing louder and beginning to race, trying to outrun the tears that were creeping up at the end of her words.

‘Annie, Annie. Slow down, shhh.’

Her voice became clearer. ‘Charlie?’

There was a cadence to her voice that he recognised from their childhood; the unfailing faith she had in him to find the answer, to fix things when they went wrong. And why wouldn’t she have faith? Charlie had been the one who’d taken care of her when their mother hadn’t or couldn’t. It was he who’d balanced on a chair to cook eggs and beans while Annie played on the kitchen floor, knees grey with cigarette ash, nappy heavy with piss. And later, it had been Charlie who had stood between their mother and angry boyfriends, he who’d run things when she’d left them for days on end. When Annie’s periods had started, it was Charlie she’d asked for the money to buy her first box of Dr Whites. And now, he could hear in her voice, she needed him again.

‘Annie do you want me to come over?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Please, Charlie, will you come?’

Lying on the sofa, his eyes fixed on a smudge on the ceiling, Limpet seemed to have fallen into a trance. Charlie poked him on the arm.

‘Mate, don’t you think you ought to go back to bed? You look like shit.’

Limpet bolted upright, his eyes locked on his flatmate. ‘When’s the wedding then?’

‘Eleven. I’ll see you there, right?’

‘Yeah man, see you later.’

‘And Limpet?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Go back to bed, for fuck’s sake.’

The front door opened onto a tiny triangle of green. On a bench in the far corner a sparrow was hopping back and forth, but otherwise the street was empty. In the quiet of the early morning, West End Lane was spacious and peaceful, the windows of the red-brick flats above blanked by curtains as Charlie walked towards Kilburn. Annie and Ben lived above the High Road, down an alley beside the fishmongers and up a geriatric zigzag of rusting iron steps. From outside their front door, Charlie could see a clutch of lime trees peeking out from a garden on the street behind, their leaves sticky in the watery sunshine. He banged the door with the flat of his hand and Annie answered wearing a floral housecoat and clogs. To his relief, she was smiling, a wide grin that showed a dimple in her left cheek. Charlie pulled her into a hug and kissed the top of her head.