In Ascension E-Book

Martin MacInnes

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 557

Beschreibung

BLACKWELL'S BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Mesmerising' Sunday Times 'Magnificent' Guardian 'Monumental' The Telegraph Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth's first life forms - what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings. Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency's work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos. 'Utterly compelling' The Times, Books of the Year 'Profound and thrilling' New Statesman, Books of the Year 'A far-reaching epic' Financial Times, Books of the Year

Leseprobe

Also by Martin MacInnes

Gathering Evidence

Infinite Ground

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2023 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Martin MacInnes, 2023

The moral right of Martin MacInnes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 624 0Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 625 7EBook ISBN: 978 1 83895 626 4

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

CONTENTS

ENDEAVOUR

DATURA

KOUROU

NEREUS

ASCENSION

PART ONE

Endeavour

ONE

I was born in the lowest part of the country, 22 feet beneath the sea. When my sister arrived three years later we moved south into the city proper, Rotterdam’s northern district. The land was newly excavated, freshly claimed from the seafloor, dredged by ships and reinforced by concrete. Parts of the street came loose, the ground underneath still soft. I remember burning incense, a brackish smell indoors, as if every moment were a spell, a scene that had to be called into being.

The river beach was artificial, and when we walked over it I imagined underneath us was a hollow area, a huge chasm. We went there on weekends and on holidays, my father paying careful attention to the tides, never settling in one place but marching from one direction to another. I poured sand into my plastic bucket, compacted it, upturned it, did it again and again. ‘Don’t dig too deep,’ my father warned, before turning his vigilance back to the water.

In the Second World War, the centre of Rotterdam – the historic old town – was entirely destroyed. My parents’ memories, growing up, were of wide spaces, broad avenues, wind that whipped in from the ports. They could see further because so many fixtures had been levelled. They showed me photographs printed on small sheets of white card with large black borders. The scenes were cloudy, dirt filled, and everything – from the remaining buildings to the figures caught walking between them – seemed smaller, lower. This reassured me, indicating that the world was growing, still in a state of creation. Maybe one day it would be finished. Rotterdam’s skyline – powered by glowing refineries lining the huge port – now resembled Manhattan, a forest of steel, chrome and glass. One Sunday afternoon when I was five years old my spade sliced through the sand and clanged against the concrete underneath. The impact fizzed across my nerves, leaving me light-headed. It wasn’t real. I will never forget the look of horror my father directed at me. I’d ruined something, the look said. I’d pierced the illusion and now I had to pay.

My mother, Fenna, came from the north, the only child of a nurse and a factory worker, both of whom died – her mother of cancer, her father of an unspecified illness shortly after – when she was starting university. It was tempting to see mathematics – her passion, her life’s work – as a consolation, an escape from reality that could hide under the guise of a confrontation, but as Erika, Fenna’s first cousin, said, that just wasn’t true. Fenna had always been interested. Not just interested – captivated, obsessed. She was a shy, withdrawn child, who rarely spoke unprompted and who was so accustomed to positioning herself around a book – hands gripping it, eyes gazing at it, knees raised in support of it – that she seemed incomplete without one.

She never attempted to describe what she did, an unhelpful habit I’d perhaps picked up myself. Though she spent most of her life at the university, she was never a teacher, an explainer. Mathematics wasn’t about communicating, passing something between people; it was purer, closer to music, an act of revelation. The titles I glimpsed on her shelves – Philosophy of Cusp Forms; Projectile Transformations; Hyperbolic Motion; Ultraparallel Theorem – were like convex surfaces; I ran my hands over them without getting any closer to the substance underneath. On one spine was an infinity symbol, two loops running into each other endlessly, with no accompanying title. I couldn’t see what she did all day, couldn’t imagine what she thought of all her life. If Fenna could speak the language that she thought in, the sound would be like nothing in the world.

She frequently suffered migraines, lying in a room of her own, eyes closed, wet white handkerchief spread over her brow. During these episodes, the tension inside her spilled throughout the house. Our father, Geert, patrolled the building, ensuring we never raised our voices, never opened or closed a door, never turned on our computer. He would glare at me for even thinking too loudly. He liked this, taking care of Fenna as a form of discipline. It gave him purpose and occupation. If anything, it was more awkward after she recovered, in those brief periods where, having lost the roles we were trained in, none of us knew what to do. I’m certain Fenna exaggerated her symptoms, or at least prolonged them sometimes. Her episodes put a barrier around her, gave her space, time alone. No more questions, no explanations necessary. But mainly it would be for Geert, making him feel useful, giving him a role, distracting him, and thus protecting us, from the more volatile parts of his personality.

There were two sources of violence in my childhood, and one of them was growth itself. My bones lengthened in sudden, dramatic spurts. Nights could be agony, unbearable pain throbbing through my legs. I’d go months without a full sleep. I had nightmares of a miniature industry working beneath my skin, rebuilding me, leaving me outside as a stranded and helpless observer. I sweated, sometimes vomited, from the sheer strangeness of the experience. And yet through all this Fenna was there for me, able to put aside her own suffering. I didn’t have to call for her, didn’t have to make a sound, she somehow sensed when I needed her, and she came. She soothed me, pushing the damp hair from my forehead, pressing her hands onto my thighs and calves, gripping them, digging into the flesh, then rhythmically massaging up and down, grappling with the pain and trying to shape it into something manageable. I remember looking up and seeing her standing by the foot of the bed, and at first failing to recognise who she was. There was a wildness in her as she pushed into my limbs with force. She pushed again and again, with rhythm and discipline, while I tried to remain quiet, tears appearing not from the pain but in gratitude for the first startling signs of its relief. As she stood above me, in the dark, she almost seemed a part of me. I wonder if she enjoyed this – the fact that I needed her, the sense that we were joined. We had never been this close. We never spoke on these occasions – I wouldn’t have been able to, had I tried. She made strange, soft, bird-like fluttering sounds, trying to soothe me, the last sounds I heard before falling asleep.

I measured myself by tape every evening – wary of marking the walls – and noted the discrepancies in the morning. It used to frighten me, the knowledge that this power came from within, that there was something inherent in my body furling out like this. It was like my full adult shape had been prepared, condensed, knotted into a fine ball at birth and left to slowly open out. I was daunted – I wasn’t sure I could do this on my own, but with my mother there, in the night, not just overseeing me but directing me as I grew, and changed, I knew I didn’t have to, knew I wasn’t really alone at all. When I took my first slow and unsteady steps in the morning, setting myself down on the kitchen bench with the table before me and the wall at my back, Fenna looked at me with simple gratitude and pleasure. It meant something to me – the evidence that my appearance had made her happy, the proof that she really wanted me, after everything.

___________

Geert had only ever wanted one thing – to be an architect. He was intent on this as a child, and studied towards it. But something went wrong, and his entrance exams were a disaster. His performance in those exams was so woeful, he had forgone the possibility of ever repeating them. He had blown his one chance, and he never got over this. It was only long after I left home that I heard about these ambitions, and how they’d been thwarted; he never said anything to me. It was Erika who filled me in again. She didn’t know the full story herself, but hinted that nerves were a problem, that Geert had suffered from crippling anxiety.

And so Geert, who had only ever wanted to be an architect, to build things on the land and to see accumulation, had ended up doing the one thing he expressly didn’t want to do, the same work his forebears had done: he went to sea. Initially, like his father and grandfather, he worked on Atlantic trawlers, away for months at a stretch. He made this decision, if I’ve worked out the timeline correctly, almost as soon as he failed the entrance exams, as if he’d wanted to punish himself, feel the sting of the freezing salt air on skin sliced raw from the thick ropes. He did this for years, lasting longer than many, and saved a considerable amount of money. Somehow, then, inexplicably, he met Fenna.

They collided on the street, at night, falling into one another. He was intoxicated, he had come from a bar, and he was aghast, mortified at his clumsiness. They spent the next twenty-four hours together. Afterwards, he was changed. He was obsessed, he couldn’t think about anything else. Overnight he became a different person. He was filled with purpose, potency. He couldn’t bear to be away from Fenna. Going to sea was a desertion, a disaster. Jealousy and paranoia ate at him on the ship. He was as surprised as anyone that Fenna – dark, sophisticated, beautiful – had shown an interest in him, and he taunted himself – it had all been some dream, surely. Coming ashore, he made a rash, emotional decision, something completely unlike him: he vowed never to go back to the ship. Though Fenna was sure to come to her senses soon, and to want nothing more to do with him, he had to leave open the slim possibility they might continue to see each other, might even – he almost couldn’t bear to think it – build a future together. That day, he made two phone calls, one to his port agent and the other to the woman he would spend the rest of his life with.

It’s all there – the sea, the mysterious woman, the chance encounter that transforms two lives. The fact that cliché is the only way I have found to talk about it is, I think, proof of just how inexplicable and unjustifiable – and how much of a mistake – their union was.

As it turned out, Geert hadn’t actually left the sea entirely. He would continue working there, indirectly, for almost four decades, until finally, in some anonymous, sparse water board office, his lungs gave out for good, and he died.

Geert’s great-grandfather, on his father’s side, had worked for the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, in its dying throes. His father in turn had also worked for the VOC, as had his father – or so the story goes. Johannes, Geert’s father, liked to tell stories about the adventures of our forebears. I remember Fenna’s blank smile as the old man went on – she didn’t believe a word of it. The VOC, Johannes said, was the beginning of the modern age, the invention that made all this – he gestured through the windows at the Rotterdam skyline – possible. Launched in 1602, it was the world’s first publicly listed company. It had all the powers of the state. Its fleet of ships travelled the world, signing treaties, making enemies and allies, executing prisoners, colonising whole countries. The VOC even minted its own coins. Johannes told us great adventure stories set in distant Indian Ocean islands, of castaways and buried treasure and amazing discoveries, and my sister and I were captivated. These stories, which were so exciting and dramatic, made our own lives seem dull and unremarkable. But Johannes said none of these adventures would have been possible had the Netherlands been even slightly different. It was precisely because of the lowness of the territory and the difficulty of farming here that the VOC had been created. The Netherlands had had to reinvent itself, and became a country of the imagination. While the original Netherlands had stayed in one place, its shadow country, the VOC, travelled the world. The original country was in peril, threatened by the water all around it, always at risk of flooding, while the VOC exploited the world’s oceans; as if the constant threat of drowning had inspired the country to know the oceans like no one else did.

Geert didn’t like these stories; this was one of the reasons Johannes enjoyed telling them. Johannes was big, loud, a red-faced man who seemed to overflow from his armchair. To us, he was nothing like our father – Geert was wiry, exhausted, reluctant and uncommunicative. But I see things differently when I look back now. All his life Geert was afraid of his father, whose attention and approval he craved, even as he hated himself for this weakness. Little things Johannes said – jokes, comments that made us laugh – had an effect on him. You could see Geert biting his tongue, then leaving the room, Fenna’s look of mild concern underneath her smile. But the last thing I ever would have suspected, back then, was that Geert feared Johannes in the same way my sister and I feared Geert himself.

It’s obvious now that he didn’t just suspect he’d disappointed his father, he had it proved to him again and again. First of all, there was his work. In his father’s eyes Geert was weak, unable to stomach the sea. For the rest of his working life, right up until he died in one of their city offices, Geert worked for the regional water board, the Waterschappen, as a hydraulic engineer and advisor. As I found out later, when in a fit of predictable remorse I began researching his life, trying to piece everything together, the Waterschappen went all the way back to the thirteenth century, when it formed a set of semi-autonomous government bodies, holding elections and taking taxes. Johannes never said this in his stories – it would be giving Geert too much credit – but there was a clear link between the innovations of the Waterschappen and the establishing of the VOC. The work it did, and continued to do, was vital. I wish I had understood this at the time, when Geert was alive.

Without the Waterschappen, the Netherlands couldn’t exist. The country would immediately be inundated, overwhelmed by water; more than two-thirds of the land would disappear. The Waterschappen, with their armies of engineers, were constantly adapting and designing new ways to dam the rivers, remove excess water, and build up artificial coastlines such as the thin beach we visited regularly in my youth. The work was never finished; water management was an unlimited project. This was what I failed to understand at the time, and what I can see now was the pressure Geert carried on his shoulders every day of his long service. So when he came home in the evenings it was not in relief, but in resignation. It didn’t stop. Weekends and vacations were only temporary reprieves from the task of understanding, predicting, negotiating and dispersing the water that would otherwise flood the wider Rotterdam region, an area containing more than 2 million people.

Once he had committed to this life, there was no way he could get out of it. He was angry at us, his daughters, because the financial demands of our existence bound him to it. But his temperament was also affected by what he saw at work, a world that was perilously balanced, an environment hostile to humans, with catastrophe deferred only through the surgical intervention of specialist teams. Not that he wanted gratitude for it, just some recognition of the existence of the threat.

He saw complacency everywhere, and he hated it. Last thing every evening he set our plates out at the table for the next morning’s meal, like a summoning, a small prayer, as if this preparation and investment would make the new day more likely to come into being. He rose early, even on days off, insisting that we did too, typically no later than 7 a.m. I remember him standing in the garden at dawn, directly outside my room, feet crunching on the stones, and with excessive, vigorous energy, beginning to loudly clean my window. It was with surprise that, later, I wondered whether his actions, which I had always interpreted as sadistic, were really more about wanting us to enjoy ourselves, to go out and do things and experience the world. Our freedom was an affront to his confinement but work had also taught him that life could not be lived passively, it had to be seized and fought for. If he worked as hard as he did – sometimes he came in so stiff he could barely sit down, preferring to stand in doorways or with his back against the wall – then the least we could do was relish what he had given us, not waste away our days in bed.

As children, my sister and I never tried to understand his formidable temper, we simply feared it, tried as much as possible to hide from it. Perhaps the most frightening thing of all was that it was completely unpredictable. Because we didn’t know him, we didn’t know what he might do. Anything we said or did, no matter how innocuous, might unleash this torrent inside him. I have never once heard anyone roar like my father did. These great blasts of noise seemed to echo in the chambers of the house for hours, for days afterwards. He would smash objects, flinging them against the wall. His energy, the vigour of his anger, was astonishing. He moved with unbelievable swiftness, bounding across the room to grab me and lift me by the collar of my shirt. These outbursts of course only happened while Fenna was at work. It was as if all throughout her silences his resentment and anger were gathering, and he waited, brooding, for the chance to let it out.

Helena, being three years younger than me, was spared the worst of it. Geert frequently hit both of us, hard slaps that we tried to cower from and palm away, protecting our heads, inadvertently frustrating and so provoking him even more. But worst of all were the sustained beatings that lasted several minutes. As far as I know, Helena was never subjected to these. I don’t know why; perhaps Geert satisfied his appetite with the violence he committed on me. Perhaps Helena simply didn’t provoke him in the way I did. Or perhaps something in the way that I reacted to my father’s beatings inhibited him from carrying out the same attacks on his youngest daughter.

I never spoke about this to Fenna, but she must have been aware of it. The migraines, as well as forcing a general silence in the house, a silence that prohibited all forms of communication, and thus ruling out the possibility of me telling her the story, may also have been a symptom of her own fear and sense of helplessness when faced with Geert’s rage. Though he never laid a finger on our mother, the threat was implicit, clear in the bruises on my arms, neck and face. I had been thrown repeatedly against a wall. The worse the beatings got, the more withdrawn Fenna became. She spent less time at home, working longer and longer hours at the university, retreating into a purer world of symbols, logic, timeless truth. Ironically, given what would happen later, I never understood this, and I blamed Fenna for not helping us. For all I know, maybe she did try to intervene, and Geert’s response was so explosive that it immediately ruled out further efforts. The long nights where she wordlessly, but not silently, nursed me, soothing my stirring limbs, were her way of caring for me, protecting me, retrieving me.

One of the few things I remember our mother saying about Geert’s qualities was the same thing that to Helena and me was a source of such terror: he was impossible to predict. She smiled as she said this, her voice softening, her eyes straining towards some memory from the deep past: ‘Whatever he does, it is always a surprise.’

It seemed particularly tragic, though probably not all that unusual, that what had once defined him positively had gone on to be the essence of all that was worst in him. Like all children, I’ve never been able to convincingly imagine the lives of my parents before me, a period of innocence, with fewer obligations and commitments, and I’ve certainly never believed that Geert’s nature could ever have been a source of delight, of enchantment. Geert forever showering our mother with kindnesses, surprise gifts, impromptu weekends away. Geert, put into a novel situation – meeting Fenna’s extended family, say, or her work colleagues; difficult circumstances for anyone, and certainly for a quiet and withdrawn man like him – and surprising her, astonishing her, showing further reserves of his personality, new sides to his character, so that she can fall in love with him all over again. Could that really be true? His total unpredictability, in this early stage, veered close to a kind of endlessness, an unlimited, uncontainable personality. He could do anything at all. The potential for violence may have been there all along, ready to be triggered by a special set of circumstances – fatherhood – but otherwise not only lying dormant, but actually driving the happiness he created and the good things that he did. Maybe that explained why Fenna could never confront him, could never challenge him about the violence: if she condemned him then she also condemned all the happiness they’d enjoyed, and however much she regretted the pain he caused us – a pain she clearly experienced herself, in her migraines – she just couldn’t bring herself in all conscience to do this.

One of the harder things, for Geert, in his later decades at the Waterschappen, was how much everything had changed, particularly in the level of automation introduced into the work, something he never fully trusted. Prediction was fundamental – forecasting annual water levels, gauging the severity of an upcoming storm, deciding in advance whether to call for the evacuation of an area – but the further we moved into the twenty-first century, the harder this became. Temperature fluctuated abnormally, the seasons overlapped dramatically, and flooding became an issue throughout the year. Months’ worth of rain fell in a single day. Enormous breakers hurled themselves against the sea walls and the bulwarks and the artificial coastal barriers that Geert and his colleagues had erected. What had always been a difficult job quickly became impossible. The rising temperatures led to a series of river spills, creating a permanent marshland. Mosquitoes arrived, thriving in the new wetlands and introducing the first strains of malaria in the region in more than seventy years. Geert, at this stage, was close to breaking, completely overwhelmed, at a loss either to explain or to keep up with the changes. Reality had defeated him, completely outstripping the limits of his imagination. When he arrived home in the evening he was slow, ponderous, almost shocked. He had no idea what the next day would bring; he could no longer picture what would happen. It must have terrified him. The whole ecosystem was changing and he couldn’t keep up. The smallest detail could effect the wildest change. Mosquitoes would colonise the landscape. Excess salt inland would ruin agriculture. But this was only the beginning. When he looked outside, I thought, he could see only the end of the world.

Against his wishes, new automated storm barriers were installed, an artificially intelligent system that communicated with satellite data and erected defences whenever flooding threatened. The lives of over 2 million people depended on this inscrutable intelligence, and at this, Geert finally broke. He had been left behind. His retirement was coming up and there was no question of him continuing, even before the illness. His whole life was an effort to keep the sea at bay, and when he relapsed, and his lungs gave out, I imagined – or hoped – that there was the tiniest, briefest moment of calm and acceptance at the end, his last conscious moments, as he knew he didn’t have to struggle any longer.

As a frustrated architect, he always considered himself and his achievements a disappointment, but the irony – and I wish he could have seen this – was that through his work he constantly built and rebuilt the country, hour after hour, day after day. Without the passion, ingenuity, and courage of people like Geert, our country couldn’t have existed. He was architect and archaeologist, planning and excavating, implementing systems to dredge and divert water, digging up the country, bringing it out into the open. There were vast, highly elaborate artificial coastlines, peninsulas built from imported sand, tall embankments that would be naturally dispersed as the water shifted, disseminating the sand evenly across the land edge. There were concrete and steel megastructures embedded in the coast, shifting it and raising it as necessary, new superficial landscapes that were printed from factories.

I expressed none of this while Geert was alive. Perhaps I didn’t feel he deserved to hear it from me. But sometimes I still wonder whether I could have said something, maybe not in so many words, but still something, a gesture, a signal of my appreciation for what he’d achieved, telling him, as if he needed to hear it, that it had been worth it, the forty-year battle; that it hadn’t been for nothing.

On the morning of the funeral, Fenna dug out a photo of me aged six or seven, standing with Geert, both of us grinning and wearing waders. She said that when I was young, before I started school, I followed him everywhere, and frequently went with him to work. I had forgotten all about it. I had always been fascinated by islands, and I recalled now Geert telling me how the Netherlands, as a military tactic, when the country was at risk of invasion, would release the gates and barriers, flooding the country and transforming it into an archipelago, the water level too high to wade through but too low to sail in, making it impervious to attack – using the country’s vulnerability as defensive strategy, as strength.

At the funeral, I was the only member of our immediate family who helped carry the casket. I was the only one tall enough. I had always been ashamed of my height; I wanted to be more petite, more like my sister, not long and angular like this. I could carry my father because I was more like him than I realised; I had been carrying a part of him all along.

TWO

Our mother wasn’t expressive when Geert died. She seemed more surprised than upset, intrigued almost by this changed world, the suddenly more spacious house and garden, the smaller meals, the softer scents and flavours, the new feel of the mattress, the absence of sounds she had become accustomed to, such as the almost permanent flow of folk music from the radio into the kitchen and garden. Helena and I stayed with her for as long as we could, but she neither wanted nor needed us around. The morning after the funeral she appeared in the kitchen with her work things and left on her bicycle just as she would on any other day. We lay around the house redundantly, drinking, sorting through Geert’s things, Helena seeing to the practicalities, contacting the lawyers, while I veered from appalling, cheap nostalgia – picking up Geert’s boots, seeing if they fitted me, lifting up his sweaters and being drawn to the loop of the neck – and blind fury, remembering the worst of it. Helena didn’t engage with my excesses, and after three days, after Fenna insisted she was OK, and only after Erika promised to come round regularly and check on her, we left our mother alone in the house.

Helena left as quickly as she could, first to New York then to Jakarta, while I stayed closer to home, studying marine ecology and microbiology in Rotterdam and at the Max Planck Institute in Bremen. Inheriting our mother’s talent for mathematics, Helena ended up in financial law, working for a series of banks and insurance adjustment companies. It was Helena herself who pointed out something I couldn’t see: if she followed Fenna, then my work followed Geert. This shocked me – both the evidence of inheritance and the fact I hadn’t seen it.

Much of my childhood remains blank, my earliest memories beginning around five or six years old. It always alarms me to hear others recalling details from infancy; I can’t imagine a memory and a language so close to non-existence. I learned to speak late, as I neared school age, something that drew concern from Fenna at the time. I’ve never asked Helena about her first memories, but I wouldn’t be surprised if her experience was completely different to mine. Helena and I are very different people, three years and two oceans being the least of what separates us. The first thing that comes to mind when I picture her is the expression: mouth open in a small ‘o’, stoic yet innocent. I see her like a cartoon fawn – small, meek, in need of protection. It’s an idealised picture, typical of my lack of understanding and tendency to substitute sentiment for insight, because she’s much stronger than the image allows. When we were young we were pushed together out of necessity; unable to describe what was happening to us, we naturally turned to each other, the only other person who could understand. It’s logical that at the first chance of fleeing she should do so. I’ve never blamed her for that.

Helena managed to avoid the worst of it herself, while remaining terrified of our father. She was very clever, very skilful. Something about her made her less of a target; I don’t know exactly what. A talent, a knack. She was quieter, she got on with things, whereas I protested. She didn’t complain, but continued looking outwards, seeing everything through those narrow eyes under the awkward, severe fringe of her pre-pubescent years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her cry; she has a remarkable talent for observing almost anything with apparent equanimity. Geert admired this, and I was envious of it; I wanted to be cold and cool like Helena, who shrugged off the world. But I couldn’t.

For all the nights Fenna massaged my limbs, Helena slept soundly. This is a gift she was born with, and which she retains to this day. She loves to sleep; uncharitably, I’ve sometimes thought that sleeping suited her because it was closer to her passive waking state. But actually, as Helena grew older, and we moved to a new house, still within the Rotterdam limits, and for the first time we had our own rooms, she became increasingly assertive and sure of herself. Her voice changed, becoming lower, louder, less liable to be dismissed. Again, I envied this. Helena had the advantage of youth, of watching and learning from what happened to me, putting forward a personality that could protect itself. I didn’t have the luxury. I came first; I didn’t know; I could only be myself, feet swinging from chairs, mouth hanging open while I read. Helena was a realist, a fighter, a survivor. Geert’s terrorising had ironically carved her into the type of person who could withstand it, just as it meant she was less likely to be a target of it.

When we were younger, and shared a room, in the bunk-beds that I loved, with their sense of enclosure and intimacy and camaraderie, we naturally shared a lot of other things too. Helena had the advantage of the books I read, and the disadvantage of the clothes I too quickly outgrew. We invented games and told elaborate stories where we featured as heroic protagonists facing unnameable nemeses. We had our toys, our shared computer, but what we most enjoyed – and I’m as sure as I am about anything in my life that we were equal in this – was being outdoors, in the field near our first house or in the small wooded area it connected to. We lost hour after hour there, pushing through thick undergrowth, creating tunnels with our bodies, new pockets of empty space that hadn’t existed until we went there. Many of my memories from our time together are silent; we’re busy at something, playing together, but not talking. This was strategy: the lack of speech in our games took away the feeling of time passed, instead making it expand, our determination not to talk about Geert being, among other things, an attempt to make him less substantial. The only time I spoke to Helena about the beatings, I immediately regretted it; her eyes pleaded with me to stop. It was for my sake as much as hers; nothing could be gained from repeating this. After that one occasion, not only was the topic sealed forever, but Helena seemed to amend her understanding of the past, as if willing herself into believing these experiences had never actually taken place.

Our early closeness wasn’t helpful – that’s obvious. As we aged, we drifted apart. It was precautionary, tactical. Helena was at risk of becoming similar to me, and thus being an equal target for Geert’s beatings. Instead, she had to be tough. Only in pushing me away – bewildered and possibly hurt as I was – and assuming her own space could she become her own person. There’s no other way to see it than that I had held her back, drawn violence towards her. If she had stayed in the same space as me, continued to be like me, then I am certain the attacks would have repeated.

One of the things I am most grateful for in my life is that Helena never had to be like me. If one single thing justifies my existence, it is this. I was an example in negative. If I lived my life in error, drawing pain helplessly and unconsciously towards me, then it was still worthwhile in repelling that same pain away from my sister. Eventually, having fled, she would lead a happier, more comfortable and more confident life without me.

Beginning from our adolescence – and despite the fact that I’m 4 inches taller – people have always inverted our ages. Whatever I do, however I behave, I’m always taken for the younger sister. It’s something fleeting, ineffable. A bearing, an ease of being in the world which you can’t just will, and which I’ve never had. Helena somehow just knows that she belongs, that she has a right to be there, wherever she is. It’s wonderful. And so now, when I do see her – when I travel to Indonesia, and she hosts me and we go out on boats together, or when we drink in bars on her visits home – I’m always the junior partner, the one being led. It’s not even primarily a financial thing – it’s fundamental. My sister has a maturity, a considered sense of perspective, which I find completely alien. In my mind, the world is not reasonable, and can never be made reasonable. It is much more interesting than that.

From age ten I was allowed to swim in the Nieuwe Maas on my own. The cold water shocked me and soothed me and took my mind away. I would enter the water and lie back and close my eyes and drift. Afterwards I came stumbling back along the stony beach, my feet blue and insensate from the cold. I perched with a towel around me, shivering, my head on my knees. As I tipped the water out of my ears the sound of the traffic came back. I didn’t want to go home, and it took a long time to persuade myself to get up again. The stones pressed through my thin soles as I put my weight down, and every time I left the beach I told myself all I had to do was put those same stones in my pockets and walk out into the water and I would never have to go home again.

It was an effective fantasy; I was able to carry on because I knew I didn’t have to. Every time I swam a little further, the stones cutting deeper into my feet as I clambered back ashore. One afternoon in early autumn I felt particularly hopeless. I saw no realistic escape from the situation with Geert and I lived in constant terror of him. Storm clouds were approaching and the beach was deserted. I felt a dangerous sway, the freedom of disregarding my own safety, and I marched into the water, a grimace on my face. The water burned me, sending a startled energy whipping through my body. It was so cold. As I reached the point where my shoulders became submerged, my chest started to convulse and I swallowed mouthfuls of bitter water, and very faintly, as if from a great distance, I sensed that I was about to give way.

I plunged under the water, eyes open, burrowing and kicking out all the way down. It was only a few metres deep, but I felt as if I was tunnelling further, that I had entered a chasm and was swimming in a new territory, a secret chamber of my own. The water was cloudy from the movement of my limbs, but when I stopped I could suddenly see everything very clearly. The larger rocks on the river-bed studded with worms, sponges, limpets and lichen. Beyond them the tufts of floating green and purple riverweed. Nothing made the slightest sound; no thudding in my ears from the water pressure, no chattering voices competing in my head. I gazed at the scene, hanging horizontally, suspended beneath the surface, no further movement to cloud my vision, and as if from nowhere I realised, suddenly, with appreciation, that absolutely everything around me was alive.

There was no gap separating my body from the living world. I was pressed against a teeming immensity, every cubic millimetre of water densely filled with living stuff. These organisms were so small I couldn’t see them, but somehow I felt their presence, their fraternity, all around me. I didn’t look through the water towards life, I looked directly into water-life, a vast patchwork supporting my body, streaming into my nostrils, my ears, the small breaks and crevices in my skin, swirling through my hair and entering the same eyes that observed it. In what felt like minutes, but must have been only seconds, I saw a completely different world, a place of significance and complexity, an almost infinite number of independent organisms among which I floated like a net, scooping up untold creatures with every minor shift and undulation of my body.

With a shock I breached the surface, gasping and heaving, coughing and spluttering as water surged out of me. I ducked involuntarily on each convulsion. Finally I gathered myself, and looked towards shore.

The shore had gone. Thick white wisps of cloud drifted over the water. I turned, and it was the same, the mist covering the horizon. I didn’t panic. I sensed a warmth over my shoulders, a feeling of peace. For several moments I drifted. Then I stopped, dug the last of the water out my ears, and listened for traffic. I plunged under the water again and propelled myself forward. In under a minute I had reached shore.

The mist was becoming thicker and I couldn’t find my things; I could barely see my arms in front of me. I walked carefully along the pebbles and returned, repeating the process in reverse. When I finally found my own bundle – quick-drying towel; trainers stuffed with woollen socks and house-key; jeans and sweater and T-shirt – I looked down on them as if they belonged to another person, not mine to take. Gathering the objects up, putting on my clothes, I felt I was only now inhabiting a personality, that until I entered these pre-set shapes I was diaphanous, and this form did not necessarily match up with who, or what, I was.

It was only as I began drying and dressing that I became aware again of how cold it was. My hands went a deep red and my knuckles acquired a blue tint, sore as I pressed them, as if air-bruised. My trainers were scuffed and split from the many times I’d gone over the same ground. I gripped the house-key, holding it tighter to break through the dull insensitivity of my freezing palms. I held on to this, shivering from the cold, and I thought of Helena, of how much I had to tell her.

I towelled my hair hurriedly, checked to make sure I had everything, then began running through the stones towards the gap in the long wall. I passed through it, onto the path parallel to the road. I was running as fast as I could, generating heat, wet hair whipping by the sides of my face, watching the rapid exchange of feet on the ground, enjoying the motion and feeling separate from it too, like I was in two places at once. When I saw the house at the end of the road, I stopped to ready myself. I had to make myself familiar, know the right things to say, assume the correct shape again. I had been somewhere wild and dangerous, and now I had to return. And at the thought of this – the absurd rituals of family life – I began convulsing again, but this time in laughter, a deep, heaving force that made me buckle on the roadside, arms planted at my knees, enjoying the bittersweet warmth of every breath.

THREE

The microscope seemed to generate the creatures spontaneously, producing life where there had been none before. They appeared like tiny circular pieces of glass, and if they hadn’t been moving independently I might have thought they were reflections of the lens. Having received the gift for my eleventh birthday, I became increasingly interested in microscopy. I got better at looking, expanding the world by diminishing it, peering down into the smallest crevices. Digging deeper and deeper into the micro-scale brought out unimagined receptacles of time and space. These creatures were complex and purposeful and beautiful in their own way – tight knots of DNA circled by drifting flagella propelling themselves through water. I peered in awe at the oval nucleus of an amoeba. Individual bacteria were intelligent and wilful: they had a sensory system, they reacted to stimuli and experienced and acknowledged time. At this same magnification, I could see the composite cells of my own body.

Ordinarily I couldn’t see any of this. Only through careful and deliberate study could I witness what had been in front of me all along. And so I did this, at home and at school. I remember this as a great period of visibility, the world bursting into appearance. The air was thick with teeming life, just as the oceans and the rivers were. A spoonful of seawater or a pinch of soil between your fingers held billions of living things. We were blind to this out of necessity, because if we saw what was really there we would never move. It was around us, between us, on the edge of us and inside us. It coated our bodies and we released waves of it when we breathed and spoke. It was in every skin cell and in the eyelashes that fluttered when we dreamed. It adapted to every aspect of our behaviour; if animals were shaded out, and microorganisms illuminated, then our ghosts would be clear in these bright peripheries. My favourite species were those that lay dormant in husk form before reanimating, such as the rotifers discovered in Arctic ice-sheets after 24,000 lifeless years. Able to withstand almost any force, they seemed to challenge the distinction between life and death, annihilating the concept of straight and linear time to suggest something more circular and repetitious instead.

Throughout my school years I worked hard to be as anonymous as possible, something that wasn’t aided by my unusual height. Every decision I made was done in service to the larger project of becoming less visible. At home, as I grew taller and taller, I learned to affect my posture to appear smaller than I was. My height was confrontational, too loud, and an affront to my father. Whatever gave me the right to grow out like this, to take up disproportionate room in our house?

By mid-adolescence my height had levelled out, and I wasn’t so conspicuous among my peers. I joined several clubs after school, with others who were similarly interested in laboratory and fieldwork. When I left home, finally, for university, I immersed myself in study, and excelled. I felt at ease and in control of what I was doing for the first time in my life. Though they lived just a few miles away, I saw my parents and sister only irregularly. Our relationship had changed, and we were awkward in each other’s company, unsure in which arrangement to sit when we met at a restaurant for lunch. Even Helena looked at me curiously, interestedly, sensing the shift.

At the earliest opportunity I specialised in marine work. I was already learning German in preparation for my master’s in Bremen. The culmination of this degree was a six-week placement a third of the distance across the Atlantic, on the Azores islands, collecting phytoplankton in the mountain lakes. The subterranean heat, the mid-ocean remoteness, the relatively clean air from the small number of vehicles combined to make the lakes a promising location for unusual algal strains.

I left early each morning, trying to gain an elevation before the sun came up. I swam and dived, collecting samples which I stored in a fridge in my room back at the guest-house. I got into a routine, and before the first week was out I realised I was relishing it – the clear air, the dramatic geology, the priority of the climate I had to base all my movement around. I had missed this time alone, outside, far from the mass unconscious contact of the city. I was twenty-three, I worked on my own, my Portuguese limited to the basic vocabulary and rote statements I’d managed to learn so far. I stayed with a young family in a large eighteenth-century villa a twenty-minute drive from the main harbour. The family laid out breakfast and prepared dinner through the week; at first I was mortified, insisting through gesture that I would provide for myself, but by the end I’d learned to accept and even enjoy my position as an overgrown, passive, and largely silent child.

I swam in the small cove near the guest-house last thing in the evenings, diving and playing in the stringy white surf, watching the stars become clearer each night as the moon waned, losing myself and forgetting my compass points – the sky, the sea – floating, tumbling, sinking in the cooler water, coming out breathlessly onto the firmer sand, then sitting on the long flat rocks in reflection. I imagined a life of this, in close contact, as I saw it, with the stuff of the world. I would establish my career, I would push my research, I would be restless, more determined and more committed than any of my peers. This was the objective and the priority of my life, more so than family, than relationships, than any other form of knowledge or attainment at all. I would work ferociously, happy in the contentment that it gave me.

There were few cars, the empty roads spooling out like toy tracks, twisting at wild angles up dramatic climbs from the villages into the mountains. The heat at sea level was oppressive, relieved by the cool winds coming in through the built corridors. I thought of my father and the old Rotterdam he described, the wider avenues created where the medieval town had been destroyed, the wind that was now extinct in the city, forced elsewhere by massive glass and steel offices. The VOC had used the old route to the Indian Ocean, launching on trade winds from Cape Verde and the Azores, sailing west then going south on currents and turning east at the Cape of Good Hope. These were the same winds flowing over me now, striking off the flat white buildings and blasting the surf against the rocks.

The mountain lakes were so remote, and involved such punishment just to reach them, that they remained largely deserted. After reaching altitude, the paths down into the craters were narrow and steep and occasionally required the use of ropes. I arrived sweating, sunburned and out of breath, quickly establishing my base – towel, planted parasol, water bottle, work kit – and waded out into the emerald green water. I collected samples from upper, mid and lower levels, packing the vials into the chilled containers in my bag. I allowed myself to lie down briefly as I dried, soaking up reserves of energy ahead of the long climb out of the crater and across the mountains home.

On the walk back I smelled the sulphur from the geysers, white steam twisting skyward. Farmers baked meats in scald-pits, carcasses infused with the scent and the feel of the burned-up inner rock. They were prize items for cruise-ship passengers shuttled in on yachts from the larger islands. I was fascinated by the sickening smell – rot, flesh – and by the sight of the charred meat slabs being delivered from the vents. I imagined that the flesh had always been there, burning in the lower earth, and was only now being excavated, eaten like the ritual consumption of a god. Water and steam ejected dramatically, implying the original formation of the islands, the chaos of lava and fire, cooling and hardening and creating the terrain.

I was returning late one afternoon to the village when I noticed it – a feeling that something unnameable had changed. At first I mistook it as an extension of the dislocation I already felt, my basic estrangement – lack of language, ignorance of context – from the people around me. I had come down from the lakes, as usual, around 6 p.m., noting the fatigue, the tension in my calves, the automatic motions of my body. With the guest-house in sight, I stopped. The usually shuttered cafés were open; people drifted in twos and threes through what should have been deserted streets; amplified voices and music played out from concealed speakers. If I saw more people than I usually did, if I initially sensed a feeling of excitement and opportunity, then I dismissed it as a mistaken attribution, an effect of my satisfaction after a good, long day’s work and a pleasant, even thrilling descent from the mountains. It wasn’t the scene around me that was different, as I came back into the village, it was my relationship towards it.

Still, I enjoyed this feeling, and wanted to prolong it. I was tired, and unusually hungry, so I decided to eat an ersatz burger in one of the small cafés opening late. After settling at a table and ordering my food, I looked up from my notes, alerted by something on the television at the bar. A news feature was playing: three officials stood behind a podium, faced by dozens of microphones and cameras. I made out block capitals rolling across the lower segment of the screen: UN, NASA. I flinched, and immediately went to retrieve my phone, then stopped, remembering I had no data left – in fact had purposely let it run out. If the story was important, I would find out soon enough, anyway.

I ate quickly and ravenously and drank three bottles of wheat beer before leaving the café and trailing across the central plaza towards the guest-house. I had the impression, again, of difference, a certainty not only that something had changed, but that this change was being demonstrated, was being lived, all around me. I wondered if I was witnessing the beginning of a festival, the quiet early stages when everything is still being set up. I could see no costumes, no stalls, and while the streets were busier, these were hardly crowds. And yet I could feel it, palpably – something new was taking place right now. Standing there, I tried to pinpoint exactly what it was, but I couldn’t see it. Enjoy it, I told myself. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Enjoy it for the feeling itself.

The shaded anteroom of the guest-house felt cooler after the warmth of the evening air. The dark shelves and cabinets were made from redwood sourced from the sheltered inner islands. Stepping in, almost immediately I collided with Isabella. Isabella – not much older than me, dark-haired, and petite – smiled as she usually did, and we performed our scripted interactions. But this time, instead of wishing me boa noite, she continued smiling, looking at me in expectation. She then said something I didn’t understand. I was frustrated with my poor grasp of the language – I felt I should have known the words she was using, that it was important, and yet they meant nothing to me. I did my best to smile warmly and apologetically, and then finally shrugged. Just as I stepped away, turning towards the dark wooden staircase, Isabella called out my name with renewed urgency. She smiled again, gestured to me, then drew a circle with her fingers, pointing upwards. I nodded uncertainly, and ascended the stairs.

Later that night, when my eyelids started to feel heavy and I got up to pull the shutters across the windows and peel back the bedsheet, I recalled the image from the television screen. There was something curious about it. It wasn’t the jostling mics or the flashing cameras, but the expressions of the scientists standing before them. They were smiling. The older spokesperson in the centre had a red sheen across his face, hair unkempt. The usual laborious preparations had been foregone. There was an air of spontaneity and excitement, the same excitement I had glimpsed earlier in the village and in the café, and which Isabella had tried to communicate to me at the bottom of the stairs, pointing to me and gesturing at the sky.

On each of my last four days I saw the sperm whales breach. Tourists began appearing, narrow boats with vertebraic rows of sunglasses, phones, and bright orange life-vests. The whirring sound of drone cameras was a constant. I went home exhausted, arms, calves tight from the long steep walks to and from the lakes. I ate large bowls of pasta and drank jugs of water with crushed ice and lime. The winds at night rippled through the shutters on the two- or three-hundredyear-old buildings. The skiffs in the jetty bobbed up and down. There were splashes that might have marked a further breach; it was hard to tell without a moon. The night before my flight I made my way carefully past the rocks one last time and swam out in the oily black water, turning to float on my back and look up at the immensity.

___________

Sitting by the runway-facing window, I heard my phone ping with an alert from the airport Wi-Fi, and I logged in. It was the lead story everywhere. More details would be released later, and the initial announcement was brief: NASA engineers had made a radical breakthrough in propulsion technology. There were rumours that spacecraft could achieve more than 10,000 times their previous velocity. For now, the Scientific Council said it was confident ‘major applications’ would be found in the coming years. Researchers were setting up larger trials, and it was already being described as one of the most significant engineering advances in history. The details were vague, but it had to be nuclear based, surely. Had they finally produced scalable, safe fusion?

I read email after email, article after article as I waited for my boarding call. Javier said that while he wouldn’t go so far as to call it a hoax, the pay-off from the alleged breakthrough was years away, and in that sense nothing substantive had changed. We should be sceptical of the timing; this could all be a glorified PR event, an exaggerated blast of good news after everything that had happened in the past few years.

Other reactions bordered on the ecstatic. It wasn’t just the breakthrough itself, but what it might lead to, what other advances and applications it might enable further along the line. There was potential for an exponential creativity explosion, whole new industries driven by this single, pivotal change.

The consensus lay somewhere in the middle, a kind of cautious, wait-and-see optimism. There had been little in the way of concrete details. All of this, the spokesperson said, would be forthcoming. Even so, I found it impossible not to be excited, swept along just a little by the sense of hope, opportunity, revelation. The most exciting thing was that none of us knew what would happen next. And while the sceptics might be proved right – maybe the research would stall, maybe the applications wouldn’t turn out to be as widespread as hoped – we didn’t know that for sure. What we had, I thought, what they had given us, was exactly what we needed – some hope.

FOUR

At the start of the final year of my doctorate I flew to South America’s Caribbean coast. My supervisor had secured me a position as menial help on an expedition ship travelling south-east through the Atlantic. Although the exact purpose of the voyage wasn’t clear, I was eager for experience and this was my only route aboard. I waited three days in the walled city for notice of the ship’s departure, ahead of a voyage lasting anywhere between one and two months. I walked the interior of the old city again and again, spiralling its centre, observing the huge, impregnable doors and long shadows, the elaborate cathedrals with the stench of rotting plumbing underneath. Confirmation finally came just as I was about to give up; Endeavour would leave the following morning from the deep-water harbour 12 miles past the walls.

We departed with clear skies and no wind, the ramparts around the city quickly fading, and after lengthy demonstrations of the evacuation procedures by two of the Russian crew, I was shown to my cabin, a low, narrow box with a set of iron beds stacked either side. We were several feet above the waterline, the porthole sealed shut and painted over. I exchanged brief introductions with my cabin-mates – young researchers like me – slotted my things into the allocated drawers, locked them to prevent spilling and made my way to the kitchen. We’d alternate between kitchen, linen and ‘wet’ duties – helping prepare and bring in the dives each day – and though a schedule was posted it was provisional and subject to sudden change.

Endeavour was a five-tiered vessel roughly 60 metres in length, painted off-white with the open deck a stark deep green. The inner corridors were long and cramped, the whole interior repetitive and confusing, walls lined by identical cabins, stairs and massive white steel doors that gave out onto the sea air.

The first days were long, dull, difficult. Not just the work, but getting used to the feel of the ship, the unsteady floor and walls, which were a particular problem when you were serving food and drinks. You had to think before you walked, check the floor, gauge the look of the other passengers before setting off. I was always conscious, always sceptical, which was proving quite a stressful way to be. By the time of evening clean-up I was exhausted, desperate to return to my cabin and shut myself away. I had no leisure time. There was the additional stress of not knowing anyone while being in contact with so many people as I served and cleaned. Felix, one of my cabin-mates – 3 inches shorter than me and never seen without his red cap – helped me on our first day in the kitchen, but other than that I’d barely had a conversation stretching further than two lines.