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did I fall? What planet is this?
This prince is homesick.
—I can take you farther than any ship.
—Will it hurt much?
The prince has a single vision of a rose and he closes his eyes, I am sure of it, to keep the vision in, and just as he falls, ever so briefly, both feet lift off the ground.
Navigation is an art. The DFC is an award for distinction in flying. Well done, little prince.
Whoa, the Moon.
On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 approaches the Moon by way of its shadowy side, lit only by earthshine, and seeming blue-grey to Neil Armstrong whose heart rate rises to 156 beats a minute. He has a vision of a great sphere, a perfect round evoking Earth, something he takes as a sign of welcome, and the blackness of the sky is so intense, the surface so inviting, it recalls Earth again, a night scene illuminated for the cameras.
The Apollo lands in the Sea of Tranquillity and, before stepping out, Buzz Aldrin celebrates Communion with a chalice lent to him by a Presbyterian church. On the Moon, he appreciates one-sixth gravity and the sense of direction it gives him, a feeling of being somewhere, he says, something he will miss once home, where he drinks too much and suffers from bipolar disorder, quite understandable in a person who has flown so high, achieving a flight of true distinction, only to splash down suddenly to hopeless dreams of return.
—See my planet, says the prince. Right above us … but so far!
—So what are you doing here?
From here to there. How far? Not very.
Robert Falcon Scott. Wednesday, March 21. Got within 11 miles of depot Monday night; had to lay up all yesterday in severe blizzard. Thursday, March 29. Last entry. For God’s sake, look after our people.
From here to there. What do I need? A small suitcase, a fine pair of shoes. A tiny nip of venom, a stroke of a knife. Escape velocity.
Gravity is a universal law of attraction. Escape velocity is the minimum speed required to keep moving away from a planet or star without falling back to the surface or entering a closed orbit around it, and gravitational pull diminishes the farther the surface of a star or planet is from its centre. In the case of a black hole, a star with a concentration of matter so dense it falls in on itself, and with a gravitational field so strong, spacetime, as Karl Schwarzschild first explained, will curve around it and close it off from the rest of the Universe so nothing can escape it, not even light, trapped in a body whose radius is less than a certain critical number, and where the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light. This is the Schwarzschild radius, a short straight line to the horizon of a black hole through which no signal can pass, named after Karl, astronomer, pioneer in optics, soldier, German Jew, b.1873, d.1916, winner of a posthumous Iron Cross for his pains on the eastern front, a horizon, you might say, he never escaped.
Black hole, dark star, dark matter, over 90 per cent of the Universe is invisible, unknowable. So far. Black hole, foxhole, dugout, trench, dead soldier, unknown soldier, mark him with a cross. Lost, stolen or strayed. Dark matters. I will find her. What do I need?
Begin with an eye.
Galileo will go blind, but in 1609 he points a telescope at the Moon from his garden in Padua, and in the shadows, he finds mountains and seas, writing, ‘Its brighter part might very fitly represent the surface of the land and the watery regions darker.’
An eye is a camera and it is 80 per cent water, forming in the dark of the womb into a small sphere with a lens in front, and a screen at the back with 137 million separate seeing elements, and nerve lines leading to the brain where out of a storm of electrical charges, a picture ought to appear, with all the qualities a person expects, of colour and light, contour and transparency, near and far. The eye is subject to tiny flaws and aberrations, everything has to be right, the pressure in the aqueous solution determining the shape of an eye whose lens must be clear as glass, and curved just so, and placed at the correct distance to focus the light on to the retina with its photosensitive cells, able to screen and unscreen, and produce the purple pigment that will allow for seeing in low-lit rooms, call it visual purple.
I trap the light, I remember everything, nothing escapes me, and I see marvellous things, no ticket required, a great picture show, one night only, every night, a spectacular! Son et lumière, a starry cast, and I can see clearly, I’ve got visual purple.
The first time I saw you, Mummy, you wore a red dress. It was red velvet and very slim-fitting, and you smiled at me and reached out with long sensitive fingers, a small gesture of infinite grace. I remember, even though I was only eight days old. I saw you.
When Gus came home that first time, wrapped up in Harriet’s pink baby blanket, I had a thought regarding Mum and unknown origins, and how you might expect a foundling to be a bit edgy about babies of her own, worrying, perhaps, they will go astray like a gang of puppies in a park, to be scooped up later by a dog-catcher, unless they meet a bad end in the sweeping beams of onrushing cars, like sorry spies in wartime.
The dog-catcher delivers them to a dog home, a Salvation Army type place, but for dogs, and now they are puppies of unknown origin, each one hoping for a person to come along and choose him, and take him to a better place, but whatever happens, even if the new owner is one fine person, the dog will always be looking over his dog shoulder for the other puppies and his first home, and wondering what happened and was it his fault, etc., and maybe give in to a lifelong identity crisis, who knows.
Clearly, this dark matter of unknown origins is not a problem for Mum, because instead of looking over her shoulder and acting edgy, she has gone all out for babies, with Gus the latest, and between the day he first came to us up to now, I can only recall a single event which might be understood as an open display of nerves on her part, and that was the day of the Harness Affair, when Mum unwrapped a parcel before our very eyes, unfolding leaf after leaf of white tissue paper to reveal an arrangement of white suede straps resembling reins, reins most typically attached to sledge dogs in Antarctic regions.
‘For you, Gus!’
‘Mum,’ I say. ‘Um. He doesn’t have a dog. We don’t have a dog. Are we getting one?’
‘No, no!’ she says, laughing now, and tickling me in the neck so I don’t feel too much of an eejit. ‘It’s for holding Gus. In busy roads. Until he is older.’
Well, blow me down. I never knew they made leashes for kids. One time I strapped it on Gus myself and held on patiently, waggling the reins a little in an encouraging manner, waiting for him to go walkabout in the garden.
‘Walk on!’ I said, which is what coachmen say to coach horses in old films. ‘Walk on, Gus!’
And Gus just stands there, in contemplation of the flowers or something, not budging an inch.
‘Roses,’ he says.
‘Right. Roses.’
I am not worried that Gus’s vocabulary is limited at present to the names of flowers. He has a long life ahead of him and therefore it is not a cause for anxiety in me. Neither am I all that worried about accidents of the scurrying into traffic kind. This baby is simply not aiming to scoot off anywhere in a reckless manner, I don’t think so. He is not the type.
I unstrap the harness and have a go on Harriet. I ought to have foreseen the difficulties ahead. Harriet is very meek and polite as I wrangle with straps and buckles and then her eyes grow large and suddenly she is scampering all over the joint at gallop speed with me flying on behind, missing a step or two, until I realise I just do not have to be doing this, grappling on to my sister in a frenzy of determination like a charioteer in a chariot race, no. I drop the reins and decide to let her be a wild pony in a field all by herself, the harness flapping loose, and me going in for deep breaths on the sidelines. Bloody.
The