Ghost Particles

The disappointing impossibility of time-travel

Prelude: Ghost Particles

Ditchling Beacon (50°54′07″N, 0°06′25″W)

The Downs are a good place for Jemima to get away from it, since the journalists are all camped outside the London house. She parks beside an ice-cream van. A few passers-by double take, trying to figure out where they know her from and she’s glad they don’t ask.

She remembers the first time she came here, second year of Uni, first date with Shane. It was a disaster, the hike longer than either of them planned. They lay on the hillside to rest, reluctant to start the long walk back, and she’d reached out to take his hand. They went out for two years and broke up after finals. Their relationship had been comfortable, like a warm bath, but at the end she told him, “You’re not in love with me.”

He’d protested, and she told him to think about it, really think for a second, and he admitted she was right, but that he would miss her.

Shane had been boring, but he seemed right at the time. Jemima ended up marrying an ambitious Oxford grad on the fast track to becoming an MP. He’d cheated on her at the selection event, when the party plied you with booze to see if you could hold your drink on formal occasions. He managed well enough to impress his colleagues, but not well enough to keep his cock to himself.

She learned about this when he confessed everything on Saturday, just before the Sunday papers went to print. She wishes he’d waited, so that he only needed to tell her the things that the newspapers actually printed. Once the shock exclusive was published, journalists started calling. Her description of Hugo, a Junior Treasury Minister, as a “cheating little shitweasel” made all the papers. The BBC seemed delighted by the opportunity to air that particular insult.

When she went walking with Shane, Jemima loved asking him questions about the world. What is light made of? How big is the universe? Why does time only go one way? Why can’t we remember the future? Hugo had never liked these sorts of questions. She once asked how people knew money was worth anything, and his expression was like she’d asked him to go down on her at a party event.

If she’d stayed with Shane she would have been bored, but instead she was tired and bitter. It was as if disappointment was encoded in her universe, whatever she did. Worse of all, it was her that had introduced Hugo to his most recent mistress, Lydia, when Lydia was glassy-eyed on coke at a ball.

That woman was always trouble. Jemima remembers when Lydia was passed out at a post-exam party from too much cheap cider. She lay below a patio table while people talked above her. Jemima had been watching when Lydia’s body jerked, like a cat trying to expel a hairball, before puking on the feet of a girl wearing expensive sandals. And now here she was, front page news for fucking Jemima’s husband.

She wishes she could remember how Shane had explained why we could never travel backward in time, because it seemed so wrong that she couldn’t send herself some warnings. It should be simple to go back and stop herself from calling out to get Lydia’s coke-battered attention.

Some Background

I like this as a piece, even though it would not pass muster in a creative writing workshop. There’s too much telling in place of showing, there’s no clear plot, and the character does not undergo a significant change. I still think that it’s worth a reader’s time - there is a thread of events, even if they’re not tied together in a neat progression. It offers a glimpse of Jemima’s life, in the midst of an awful pause. I like the way it explores her experiences.

The story also gains some extra resonance by being part of this collection, and there will be other stories about Jemima, Lydia and Hugo the Shitweasel (as well as Hugo’s appalling school friend, Alexander Morethwaite). Shane turns up in the collection A Foolish Journey, where he’s Laura’s partner and the cause of the rift between her and Sam. There are other stories I plan to tell about him. A Foolish Journey also includes a glimpse of Hugo and Jemima in happier times.

There’s an argument that the creative writing workshop has damaged literature. It encourages a particular style, novels divided into two-to-three thousand word workshop-able sections, with a clear but compelling point-of-view, one that is kept consistent, submerging the authorial voice. The problem with this is that it tends to produce similar work. For me, one of the benefits of this project is the play outside usual styles and forms. I’d be interested to know what you think.

Recommendations

Back in 2013, Alan Moore dismissed superhero-comic readers as “emotionally subnormal,” obsessed by “concepts and characters meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of the 1950s.” Here I am, in my 40s, and still obsessed with superhero comics.

On one level, Tom King’s Mr Miracle repeats Moore’s 1980s trick in Watchmen of taking children’s characters and weighing them down with the compromises and complexities of the adult world. King’s book features Scott Free, one of Jack Kirby’s New Gods, who is the greatest escape artist in the universe. In this book Scott Free tries to escape depression.

It sounds dreary AF when put like that, but King uses Mr Miracle to tell a story about mortality, love, the drag of real life. It should not work, it should easy to dismiss, but somehow King’s story is beautiful and moving. This is my favourite Superhero comic.