Page 20 of Statistically Speaking
She scrunches up her eyes and looks at me intently, as though she’s really looking at me for the first time.
“Actually, you’re not even that old, are you?”
“I’m thirty-four,” I respond. “Is that old enough to be your mum’s friend?”
“Well, she’s forty-nine, so I’ll let you be the judge of that.”
“Wow. She looks a lot younger.”
“I know, right?” Katie says, grinning. “And acts it. I kind of wish we were genetically related so I could inherit thatfountain-of-youth thing she’s got going on. Anyway. Mission accomplished. Off for milkshakes!”
She walks away and pauses in the doorway, gazing back at me. I wonder what I look like to her now, whether she would want to be genetically related to me as well, or if she’d run screaming from the room.
“Have you heard of the Konami Code, miss?”
“No, what is it?”
“Look it up. The way you’re jiggling everything around on your desk reminds me of it. Maybe you’ll unlock the secrets of the universe if you get it right.”
Finally, she leaves, and I manage to function well enough to google Konami Code. I don’t know why I do it immediately, but I feel like I have to because she has suggested it. Because it is something she is interested in, because it is a link between us. Because I am desperate to feel closer to her while also keeping my distance.Huh, I think as I scroll through the results. It’s a cheat code for eighties gamers that seems to have become something of a legend, a pop-culture reference in films and movies and on memes. Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A.
I was never a gamer, but the code appeals to me. I like the idea of a secret set of buttons to press that gives you a power-up or extra lives. I wish you could do that in real life, and it occurs to me that in my own way, I do. All my counting and lists and memorizing of dates—it’s like my very own Konami Code, keeping me insulated, keeping me secure.
I move my pens around, down, down, left, right, left, right, but nothing happens. There is no electronic ping, no animated confetti cannon, no superstrength neon light orcelestial choir. I do not unlock the secrets of the universe. I suppose it must be because I didn’t have a way to do the A and the B. I pack up my pens, my notepads, my phone. I stand up and decide to go home, get changed, and go for a run. Sometimes the only way to cheat-code your mind is to exhaust your body.
Chapter 9
999 Parts of the Tower of London and No New Answers
I am sitting out on Margie’s terrace, her little terra-cotta chiminea keeping us warm, the outdoor lights illuminating the table between us.
It is feeling like autumn all of a sudden, with the sound of geese honking as they fly in formation, the signs of the seasonal change all around us. I have run for miles, in and out of the sand dunes, my feet pounding paths and sinking into hollows and my lungs bursting. The plants have started to fade, the sea holly drying to a bronzed crisp, the rosebay willow herb turning to seed. I have run, and I have showered, and now I am here, my body exhausted, my mind still on fire.
The two of us have been working on a thousand-piece jigsaw showing a garish version of the Tower of London, complete with Beefeaters in their red and gold uniforms. We have mugs of cocoa and have shared a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate bar. Rock and roll.
We have just discovered that we are missing one tiny piece of the puzzle—the body of a cartoonish raven. His feet aresecurely perched on the crenulations of the tower, keeping it all safe, but his torso and head are nowhere to be found.
We have searched the floor around us and double-checked the box, but most of the raven, it seems, has fled, never to be whole again.
“Maybe it wasn’t in the box,” says Margie, perplexed.
“It was. I counted the pieces,” I reply.
“Of course you did,” she responds with a snort of laughter.
We gaze around again, mystified, until Bill raises one eyebrow at us and thumps his tail once on the ground. We both stare at him intently.
“Am I imagining it,” Margie says quietly, “or does that dog look guilty?”
“You’re not imagining it. That is the face of a dog who has eaten a cardboard raven, if ever I saw one.”
Bill chooses that moment to lie flat on his side, turning his face away from us as if to say,No comment.I reach down and ruffle his fur with my fingers.
“Well,” says Margie, “it is pretty small, so I don’t suppose it’ll do him much harm. It might mean that the Tower of London falls down though.”
I don’t reply. I am too busy thinking about a school trip I went on when I was ten, a tour of the Tower and an actor in medieval uniform giving us all the grisly stories in dramatic prose spoiled by the fact that he had really bad acne and a diamond ear stud. I was swept away with the place, and already knew all the stories, and wanted him to shut up so I could just lose myself in my own imagination instead.
That was before I was pregnant, of course, before Katie. Before I gave birth, I remind myself—not necessarily to Katie.I am making leaps that should not be made, and I need to calm myself down and take baby steps instead.
