Natural History Read Online Free PDF

‘How?’
    â€˜Nobody knows!’
    Like much that interested her, this seemed more than a mystery—it hummed with the magical. It re-entered Patrick’s mind when he found himself walking beside the river. But it was slippery as a fish, too. He understood it for a moment, and then it was gone.
    The walls of Jo’s room were hung with clippings of crew-cut men in black and white, smiling out of unhelmeted space-suits with neckpieces wide as jam jars. Patrick could name Yuri Gagarin, Neil Armstrong, perhaps Buzz Aldrin—but there were many more. The crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger, smiling in blue jumpsuits, ready to die.
    And there was a long poster mapping out the solar system as a neat arrangement of planets; Patrick had bought it for her. Its scale, she told him, even as she Blu-Tacked it to the wall, was greatly misleading.
    There were pictures taken by the Hubble Space telescope; a poster of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue. Books on the birth of the universe, the formation of stars, the theory of relativity, and wormholes and black holes.
    On clear nights, she pointed to the stars with a twiggy finger and named them for him. He was hypnotized by her wonder.
    One night, she informed him that he wasn’t standing on the surface of the planet looking up, but hanging off the planet like a bat; looking down into a limitless abyss.
    Overcome with a sudden and terrible vertigo, he reached for Jo’s hand. He sat heavily in the grass. He looked at his knees because he was scared, for a moment, to look up; she’d turned looking up into looking down.
    Up the downs, he thought.
    Patrick and Jane argued about Jo. Jane won: Jo was thirteen. Old enough to be boarder.
    She could come home at weekends and holidays. Compared to being in low Earth orbit, boarding school would be a doddle.
    Jo said, ‘Whatever. Excellent,’ and Patrick worried she wouldn’t miss them; that he and Jane were superannuated curiosities, like clunky old computers—admirable in context, but laughable too, for their limitations and design flaws.
    So Jo didn’t come to Devon, and neither did Charlie: Charlie didn’t want to go anywhere, or do anything but see his friends. They smoked dope round each other’s houses, went to Bath pubs and nightclubs.
    Patrick supposed he should be happy that Charlie’s friends were unthreatening and knowable. But he wasn’t; it irritated the crap out of him.
    Charlie took a job on a Bristol building site, hauling into skips half-bricks and broken tiles, stained old toilets, useless piping. He wore a baseball cap to keep the hair from his face. He came home in the back of a white van, and he refused to come to Devon.
    â€˜I’m just sick of moving.’
    Patrick said: ‘I thought you hated Bath.’
    But Charlie’s world had contracted to a few friends’ houses, a building site, half a dozen pubs, a few nightclubs—and the ghost of a girl on a bridge.
    Patrick had seen them together, once; an early summer evening, not long before.
    He was sitting outside the pub, surrounded by much younger people, nursing his third or fourth pint and reading The Man in the Iron Mask. And over the road, heading up from Pulteney weir, Charlie passed by. He was with the girl. She was tall, skinny, bleached blonde, in army boots and ripped jeans.
    Patrick laid down his book and watched them, greatly moved by something in his son’s countenance.
    They were sixteen, this boy and this girl, and it was summer. Bath was pink-washed in the sunset, and they were headed to a nightclub, where they would listen to loud music and maybe dance, and spend time with their friends, and maybe have sex and wake hungover and happy. And they were wasting it, walking with solemn distance between them.
    The girl paused and dug out a pack of cigarettes—a green pack, menthols—and offered one to his boy.
    Charlie took it, and offered the girl a light. She