Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind (24 page)

She brought up Tom’s files on her array. And immediately closed them. Instead, she pulled up her own studies and began drilling through her energy data sets. Hydrogen, she decided, was worth a closer look. She interrogated the data on hydrogen car ownership, rotated the charts and geographical visuals—global, continental, and regional—and calculated a trend for global hydrogen car ownership over the past five-years. Next, she searched for a correlation with individual variables in other data sets: disposable income for the same period, fresh fruit exports, per capita holiday spending, a host of commodity production figures, wholesale energy prices . . . thirty-seven variables in all. Her array flashed, cycling through regressions and wildly fluctuating figures for statistical significance. She brushed twenty-one possibilities aside. Playing with combinations of the remaining variables, she derived seventeen relationships. A fair start, she thought. By instinct, she assigned a weighting for each variable and began her quest for the perfect curve, one that matched the five-year historical trend. And as she adjusted the weightings, the curves began their shape shifting. Benjamin appeared at Jayna’s shoulder. “How can you take it all in? I feel sick just watching.”

But Jayna refused the interruption. She was closing in but the match simply wasn’t good enough. There was nothing to flag up, as yet, for Benjamin. Definitely needed more variables. She could, at this stage, submit a bland sector summary on hydrogen, but anyone could do that. No, she wanted nothing less than a full investment strategy. Worth spending the extra time. She checked her own performance statistics. On average, over her six months’ service to date, she’d concluded three projects a week, quadruple the frequency of anyone else in the department. Yes, she could afford to spend more time on hydrogen.

Sitting in the park, as she always did after work on Monday, she threw crumbs to her left and right and occasionally ahead of her. Such simple creatures. Each time she flicked her wrist, she reckoned only one or two pigeons espied the flight of stale scraps. She tested her theory by throwing crumbs to her far right. One pigeon twisted around, reacting in the instant. Correct. The other pigeons followed as though a switch had been thrown in each of their tiny brains. Jayna threw to the far left. Again, a single cadger tracked the new trajectory. Leading one minute, subservient the next.

Bother! Maybe she should have rewritten Tom’s report. She shook out the remaining crumbs from her paper bag. But she’d been right to consider her own productivity. It was all getting way out of hand. I know now what I should have done. She flattened the paper bag against her thigh and made quarter folds. From the outset I should have allocated the time I spent on his jobs to his timesheet, not mine, without asking him. He’d have thought twice, then, about asking for help.

The birds were in a frenzy. Their heads jabbed, jabbing the air as they jerked along, jabbing at the crumbs on the ground. Jayna examined the evidence of their mishaps—empty eye sockets, stump feet, trailing feathers—and noticed that two of the birds were verging on obese.

And as for Eloise and her father, she rolled her eyes to the treetops, I still get it wrong.

On the way to her residence in Granby Row, she stopped by the garish menu boards at the Jasmin Five Star Tandoori Restaurant and examined the names of the dishes: King Prawn Vindaloo, Aloo Methi, Bindi Bhaji, Baroa Mozaa. A waiter hovered in the doorway, so she turned away before he could begin his entreaties. No point wasting his time. And, rejoining the mid-afternoon crowds ambling in the hot spring breeze, she thought about her work colleagues who went back to their own kitchens in their own homes at the end of each day. She wondered if they, too, gave names to all their meals.

The incessant street projections begged the city workers to delay their journeys home. They showed trailers for the latest films intercut with clips of star karaoke performers, all aimed at sucking the more impressionable commuters towards the downtown Entertainment Quarter and the Repertory Domes. As the crowds neared their metro stops, high-kick dancers were scorched across the city skyline in a last-ditch attempt to prevent anyone leaving. Jayna lowered her gaze and scrutinized the footwear worn by pedestrians who rushed towards her or cut across her path. Today, she looked for shoes that demanded attention; shoes that demanded she look up to see the wearer’s face. And in these faces she searched for any indication that they returned her curiosity. It didn’t happen. So she stared directly into the eyes of oncoming pedestrians but she failed again; she couldn’t force any connection.

She entered her residence by the side door and climbed the scrubbed stairway to her single-room quarters on the second floor, just as she had done every working day for the previous twenty-six weeks. She changed into her loose clothes and hung her suit in the narrow, open-fronted wardrobe by the sink. Dropping onto her single bed, she closed her eyes. A difficult day. She assessed her options beyond the routine of taking a shower and dining with the other residents. She could (a) chat in the common room with her friends; (b) relax alone in her room until lights out; or (c) continue her private studies. She admitted that (b) and (c) amounted to pretty much the same thing.

“How rare is drowning at the age of thirty-four?” Jayna said as soon as Julie seated herself at the dining table. With Julie’s job at the Pensions Agency, she’d know the figures.

“Confidential . . . but not as rare as you might think.”

Harry and Lucas briefly looked up from their meals to acknowledge Julie’s remark. These four were the only diners. They ate one hour earlier than the rest of the residents at C7 because their working day was shorter by one hour. Jayna explained about Tom.

“If you consider all accidental deaths between ages thirty and thirty-five,” Julie continued, “the figures are also far higher than anyone would guess. We’ve done a study. It seems people’s natural instincts on risk are very poor.”

“Care to disassemble?” said Harry.

“I’m talking historically . . . When primitive man lived on the savannah, the risk of accidental death was high but the types of risk were limited in number. Our intuition on certainty and uncertainty was formed then. Totally inadequate now. Life’s too complex.”

“Is that a problem?” said Lucas. He was the new boy.

“Yes and no. Obviously, if people underestimate certain risks they’ll make decisions with unfortunate outcomes. But—” she paused and looked around her friends “—if everyone could grasp their true exposure to negative events there’d be . . . ramifications. People have to get on with life as though the risks aren’t there. That’s why everyone anticipates an average lifespan. I assume you all caught the latest news from National Statistics—ninety-nine years.”

“So, in theory, your colleague lost two-thirds his due,” said Lucas.

“I didn’t understand the media’s reaction,” Jayna said. “What’s so special about living to one hundred rather than ninety-nine?”

“Teasing failure from success,” said Harry.

“Anyway, I don’t believe they should massage the figures to achieve an extra year,” said Julie. “They were even suggesting taking deaths through natural disasters out of the statistics. The facts are the facts.”

“Well, I can tell you one thing,” said Jayna. “I don’t think any massaging would keep Tom Blenkinsop out of the statistics.”

The group of friends fell quiet. Jayna took a piece of bread from the platter at the center of the table and chased the remaining traces of a thin gravy from her plate. Her companions registered her eagerness and, in turn, they too reached towards the bread.

With barely two hours of her evening remaining, Jayna returned to her small room and, prompted by Julie’s remark about the savannah, she downloaded a wildlife program on the Serengeti. She turned to the cage on her bedside table. Hester had given her a branch of privet last week and it was now stripped almost bare. Observing her insects, as she always did in the evening, she jotted a note: Leaves are consumed by an insect that looks like a twig. So what is the difference between a leaf falling and a stick insect dying?

Out on the Serengeti, a lioness pounced at the flanks of a bolting zebra. Jayna had watched hundreds of similar murderous sequences over recent months and she recognized that only a few animals were immune to the carnivorous advances of others. She decided to formalize this thought by writing an essay on food chain hierarchies and biomass diversity. There were plenty of learned treatises already on the subject but she wouldn’t consult them. She preferred to work it out for herself; it all came down to basic mathematics.

The lights in her room dimmed and she prepared herself for a twelve-hour sleep. As she lay in bed she looked into her little wildlife park and, in the remaining half-light, could just discern her twiggy roommates from their twiggy habitat. She knew Hester would bring another privet branch from the suburbs. With family to take care of, she had plenty to think about other than stick insects. And she might be preoccupied over Tom’s death. But she simply wouldn’t forget.

Anne Charnock’s
A Calculated Life
is available from 47North.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2013 Yvette Owen

Anne Charnock’s writing career began in journalism. Her articles have appeared in the
Guardian
,
New Scientist
,
International Herald Tribune
and
Geographical
. She has travelled widely as a foreign correspondent and spent a year driving overland through Egypt, Sudan and Kenya.

Although Anne’s education initially focused on science—she studied environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia—she later attended the Manchester School of Art, where she gained a master’s degree in fine art. At the end of her art studies, she began exhibiting her work internationally, and on the quiet, she started writing a novel. Her debut novel,
A Calculated Life
, was a finalist for the 2013 Philip K. Dick Award and the 2013 Kitschies Golden Tentacle award for a debut novel.

Anne is an active blogger, and she contributes exhibition reviews and book recommendations to the
Huffington Post
. She splits her time between London and Chester, and whenever possible, she and her husband, Garry, take off in their little camper van. They have recently travelled as far as the Anti-Atlas Mountains in southern Morocco, and they next plan to drive from London to Athens.

Learn more at
www.annecharnock.com
and on Twitter at
@annecharnock
.